A.I. Has Arrived in Gmail. Here’s What to Know.
Table of Contents
Paid Tools
Google has also released new tools that will be available initially to people paying for a subscription to one of Google’s A.I. plans, which start at $20 a month:
-
AI Overviews for searching for emails. In the past, people could look for emails by typing keywords like “plumber” into a search bar. Now, users can type a question into the search bar, such as “What is the name of the plumber who fixed my toilet last year?”
I liked this feature — it will come in handy especially for people with bloated inboxes, since the old-school way of searching for the keyword “plumber” could load lots of irrelevant emails.
-
-
A proofread tool. Google’s A.I. can highlight an entire sentence that needs improvement and suggest a full revision. For example, it could trim a rambling sentence down to a few concise words.
Does Gemini in my inbox mean Google is reading my emails?
The integration of A.I. inside Gmail raises an important question about whether the technology opens doors to human reviewers reading our emails. That’s because in general, humans are involved in improving A.I. technology — for example, people occasionally need to manually review conversations with A.I. chatbots to ensure that their responses are accurate and appropriate.
In the case of Google and Gmail, the answer is, it’s complicated.
The company says that while its Gemini A.I. system can scan your emails to offer help, people do not look at your content, including the questions you ask Gemini to search for an email. In addition, the company said, it will not be using Gmail data to train, or improve, Gemini.
“We know it takes a lot of trust for people to invite A.I. to connect these dots,” said Blake Barnes, Google’s vice president of product overseeing Gmail, in an interview. “We can use A.I. to process and do these things like the AI Inbox in these isolated environments without humans in the loop at all.”
Mr. Barnes offered this analogy: Each Gmail user is living inside his or her own private room. Inside that room, Gemini is presented a question along with a set of emails that could have the answer to that question. All of this data processing happens within the private room, and the data does not leave this room to train Gemini, he added.
However, just because a company says it won’t look at your data doesn’t mean it technically can’t.
A Google spokeswoman said some user interactions with A.I. in Gmail — for example, questions posed to Gemini to search for emails — could be accessed and shared with law enforcement to comply with a legal search warrant. She noted that Google pushed back on government requests for excessive information.
