I did this (disabled AI features) and lost smart inbox and it honestly improved the experience: it made me realise how much rubbish I was subscribed to that I never read, so I unsubbed and blocked tons of stuff, and now my inbox is clear again

It is absurd. I disabled Gemini for my organization, and Google in return disables tab completion in gmail entirely. They are practically demanding I find an alternative at this point.

>> When I subscribed, these features were provided by traditional ML, perhaps some BERT-like encoder architecture at most, however now I cannot keep that previous functionality if I don't wish to grant LLMs access to my data.

Sorry for the sidetrack, but why is it so common to consider BERT something else than an LLM? It is one of the earliest LLMs so it's nowhere near the size of more recent ones, but even wikipedia classifies it as an LLM:

  Bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT)
  Original author Google AI
  Release October 31, 2018[1]
  Type 

    Large language model
    Transformer
    Foundation model

  License Apache 2.0
  Website arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805 
  Repository github.com/google-research/bert

And in any case it's an autoregressively-trained Transformer, albeit encoder-only. If it's not an LLM, then what is it?

BERT is an LLM. I don't see why Google needs to cater to increasingly fine parsing of politically acceptable vs. not ML workflows, because that is really what this is about.

TIL you can turn off ai features!

for those who didn't know how to do it:

1. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general

2. under "Smart features:", toggle off "Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet"

You need to do this to continue to use Google Assistant for some features as well! One day I try to set a timer on my phone, which is basically all I use the voice features for, and it forced me into Gemini AND data collection. It's truly maddening.

It's more likely that they replaced the traditional ML models with generative AI ones so there's not really a way to go back and disable only one part so to speak.

Services want you to behave a certain way. You can only work around them for so long. The solution is to abstain or acquiesce.

>Google/Alphabet is conflating GenAI/LLMs with traditional machine learning

I see people try so hard to make this distinction when it really doesn't exist. Transformers are only a little different than long short-term-memory architecture (parallelized, with attention mechanism and no recurrance).

What is the point at which is departed from tradition machine learning? Seems more like people retrofitting a moral decision to not like LLMs and trying to dress it up as a technical distinction.

Glad they did this change. It forced me to make actual filters rather than relying on gmail to filter to broad categories. Much better in the long run. Also I finally unsubscribed from things I would let go into promos and social but never read.

I just abandoned my 22yo gmail account. I feel liberated and empowered!

I found all of the new LLM features to be utterly pointless and incredibly annoying, but the last straw was when my account was abruptly locked recently. For a week I couldn't access mail, maps, photos, digital picture frames for my extended family all went dark, my personal blog ... all shut down with no reason given. No customer support available to contact to resolve google's mistake. A week later, it was suddenly unlocked again. Still no reason given.

Fuck google. You are not their customer; you are their product. Google doesn't care about you any more than Tyson cares about the chickens it sells.

Why didn't you expect Google to employ dark patterns? They're pioneers of dark patterns in software. They've probably done more than any other company except Meta to spread and advance these techniques.

It might seem simple in the current moment to separate the two, but all of these features are going to start merging. Google isn't going to maintain "old" ML features.

I'm just glad they haven't shoved AI down Google Tasks yet

On a similar note, I recently had to enable GenAI in my Photos app just to be able to search my photos, and the photo search is now worse than I remember it being before! I need to move off Google entirely for backups but I find the cross-device compatibility and convenience of the ecosystem really hard to give up. Lately, I've started using other LLM plans than Gemini just to have some of my personal details separate from the rest of Google, which has all my documents and email, etc.

I hope that enshitification calms down a bit whenever the dust has settled on frontier AI companies and we no longer have to force this into every product imaginable. Google used to be pretty good relative to the rest of the big ad tech companies (looking at Meta/Facebook with a scowl...) at giving opt-outs and settings to personalize privacy stuff. This has been a disappointing change to see

Turning all of their features off is the only way I achieved Inbox 0.

Your mileage may vary!

I blame the European regulations that drove the featureset. The problem with the legal department being the primary feature stakeholder is that usability will always be crap.

They can enshittify their product as much as they want, it just makes the case for removing every piece of Google garbage out of my life and never using a single piece of software from them.

> I believe bundling these options together shouldn't be legal

What could that law possibly look like? Do politicians get to decide on all other features corporations group together, or just ML features, and why?

You do know you can just not use gmail. I don't.

I'm guessing it's less about the AI in search and more about making sure kids are exposed to the larger Gemini ecosystem

Not just universities. If it were universities it wouldn't be so bad since most students have their own laptop and can make their own decisions. This is a play to get AI in the hands of young kids. Most public K-12 schools use Google, so they either have to opt-in to AI and/or their 'helpful' educational chatbot, or not use search at all.

Dons tinfoil hat

Have you noticed how many people already use AI to do their thinking for them. They just ask it what to think, what to do, for everything. They want that for as many people as possible. They don’t want people going outside of Google to other websites to decide what to think. Yes they will put ads in it eventually. But in the end they will also use it to influence what the population thinks.

We already have some leaders and politicians outsourcing their thinking in this way. It will make these companies incredibly powerful.

The AI will eventually incorporate ads.

> What incentive does google even have on presenting the ai summary?

I have some guesses:

They can artificially inflate the number of users who use their AI by including everyone who uses their search engine.

It trains people to be increasingly dependent on whatever google tells them instead of checking and reading multiple sources, and verifying information for themselves.

They hope to let people pay them to manipulate what their AI returns for certain searches (either mentioning certain things/products or suppressing mention of them).

Google search is getting increasingly useless as the unending flood of ad-filled AI slop websites dominates the search results and people will abandon searching with Google if they can't find some way to provide people with the information they are looking for. (it's not going well so far https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/04/analysis-finds-google...)

Frankly this seems like a good decision to me.

Google's search is increasingly AI driven (as it should be, i do not want to click on reddit links and waste my time skimming through the 1000 comment threads), asking Google to maintain a non-AI search engine is like asking Tesla to come up with an ICE engine car right now. It is not happening.

Google Search I would expect will increasingly become more like Gemini and less like traditional search. Schools could certainly go to DuckDuckGo or other search engines that are free. (Google has shown that it does not care if they do as it sees it as a dying business.)

Desperation to keep the fad alive a little longer? Maybe Google is secretly a huge fan of Kagi and wants to force Universities in that direction?

I think they're just asserting control. They want to control what you see on your devices. They own the worlds largest search engine, and they think they get to pick what's on it.

World makes complete sense. Its just ran by properly fucked up sociopaths who can't ever reach happiness so they hyperfocus on competitive zero sum games with short ego boosts and with no regard for anybody else, future of their kids or anything larger. They think their legacy like that is something that will be admired for generations because they got a lot of money and who cares how they got it, right.

Most will end up in deep regrets, ie how jobs regretted being an asocial dick and all above to his own family before dying (thats the better outcome, many simply see them as stars of their show till last moments, like potus for example). Its not some secret cabal, these people if smart naturally bubble to top of social and financial hierarchies.

It used to be much less visible, some sort of on-surface decency momentum and shit behind the curtains, now everything is out in the open for whole civilization to see instantly and its pretty tiring and nauseating.

If you don't get it its fine, it means you are a normal human being, probably well balanced. Folks like that abhor such people personally, be it c-suites of corporations or politicians or just a pos colleague.

Google blog says search will be off by default, alongside Gemini stuff.

And NYT says they would only be able to turn search on if they enable all of the Gemini stuff. That is not mentioned explicitly on google's blog. So not _that_ clickbaity?

> … and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.

So yeah the blog post says Google Search itself will be entirely off until being turned on. There’s nothing in this blog post to indicate whether Google Search can be turned on without also turning on Gemini. Although I hate the NYT, the NYT is quoting someone from Google saying there won’t be separate controls for Gemini and Google Search.

From the article, Google AI is deeply integrated with Google Search. So the article is correct - turning off one turns off the other.

From a privacy perspective, having all of this off by default is sensible. But only offering a basic product like Search if you opt into AI (when search as a capability does not need AI to function) - is newsworthy.

Does Google tie Gemini access for schools to their ability to train on the data and use it for ads and measurement like they have done to Android if you want to do anything halfway useful you used to do with Assistant before they killed it?

> A.I. features are now a standard part of Google’s commercially available search engine. “Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”

C'mon, it's right in the article.

The school can control AI on/off. Off means no search too.

the problem is that it's bundled.

you either get search + all the ai stuff, or you get none of it. you can't just opt-in to search alone.

(in other words, title is accurate. block ai = no search)

the truth is not what you think is the truth

Search is off; if you want it back on, you get Gemini summaries with it. you can't get Search _without_ Gemini

Scummy wording makes it looks like google is giving more control, but it's really the opposite.

The win would be if someone started to question why an institute would force Google products on its students in the first place.

I don‘t think that is so simple. Many schools have bought fully into the Google ecosystem, with Google Classroom, Chrombooks, etc. I used to tutor at my local high school, and for some reason traffic to Duck Duck Go was blocked, and I was forced to use Google search when tutoring my students.

DDG is trying to be too much like Google now, with the Ai summaries and chat bot.

Actual search results are still bad. Seems to be a trend across most engines

That is NOT my experience. I used to have a dump of screenshots where Google AI from search is absolutely wrong. In my experience, it doesn't work and "quoting" things never told in the source (the exact contrary sometime), responding in hindi, responding in spanish, responding in mix of languages.

Most of the time it's quicker, sometimes it's just bad.

Why would a summary of unreliable blogspam results be more reliable than the blogspam results themselves?

I find it easier to recognize bullshit from its source vs an LLM's confident and well written regurgitation of it.

"reading the AI summary is ... more reliable than actually reading the top 10 search results."

I don't quite understand what this even means. I both use AI chatbots frequently and still use keyword-based search engines frequently as well. When I use keyword-based search engines, it's usually because I want to see what sort of websites, discussions, resources, online hangouts, etc. exist around a given term, or just how the term is used. I often don't have a specific question or task in mind and just kind of want to wallow in the search results for a while, sort of like if I moved to a new city and just wanted to walk around different neighborhoods. otoh when I use an AI chatbot, it's usually because I have a specific question to ask, and often I don't know what the relevant search terms would even be. The use cases seem fundamentally different and I don't know how one could be "more reliable" than the other.

I haven't checked this month, but the few times I used Google Search this year I saw egregious errors in the AI summary ~50% of the time. Things like confidently citing a statistic whose number appeared in the top 10 results, but misrepresenting what it pertains to.

If you searched, whats my ip, you used to get your ip. Now you get an ai answer telling you to use one of the websites. How is that helpful?

Use Kagi, it mostly excludes spam.

Not my experience at all. I can usually trust chatgpt or Claude to give me accurate answers for queries but google summaries are frequently wrong

The AI summary is just summarizing the top results. It’s not Gemini.

So I can’t understand how one would trust the summary but not what is being summarized.

A recent study from oumi.ai found that the summaries contradict the sources they cite 10% of the time.

I still find search results pretty good, if you use a tool like uBlacklist on DuckDuckGo. I prefer them to AI at times, as AI homogenises things.

Google is trying to behaviorally condition children.

The relative effectiveness of the search is immaterial.

This is gross.

From my experience it's worse than any of the normal Gemini models

All we’re doing is adding another layer between us and the information. Google flash is still pulling on the same poor information. But it’s not as good at discerning what is useful and what is not as we are (people going way too far out on a limb outside of their domain expertise not withstanding, which is another part of the problem and why this stuff can be dangerous)

Can’t access the article, but would assume the schools are more concerned about students having Google AI doing their work for them, rather than concern about using the AI summary for search results?

How is this related?

at least before I was able a find a blog post or a discussion or fleck of documentation. Now I've pretty much stopped using Google because I've wasted so much time having been assured by Gemini that something is entirely possible when in fact its very much not. now I have to dig to find the canonical reference for a question, at least SEO people didn't spend a lot of energy trying to front rust crates.

This is all very tragic. we built a magic network where we could stash all the worlds information and access it from anywhere, except its been trashed by people with sleazy motivations trying to get between us and what we'd like to see.

What? No. You're completely wrong. I frequently ask about "X" and the summary cites a single random Reddit post that doesn't even MENTION "X" as source for its assertions. That literally never happened before AI.

Absolutely. Google has shown the courage to admit that their bread and butter business is changing permanently. they are adapting which the large cos rarely do.

My mother never used search. She found it too hard to manage. She uses Gemini all the time, it gives answers in her language and she does not need to type. She is incredibly happy.

My daughter talks to Gemini. The idea of going through links seems primitive to her.

The future of interface is chat/talking not going through clickbait.

I think schools should have some basic control on how kids can use AI but saying that they want to freeze the learning experience in 2020 is simply not right. It is like saying we wont allow whiteboards and markers.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has made the cigarette connection. It's interesting to note some of the cigarette companies pivoted to junk food after cigarettes went out of fashion. The business isn't really cigarettes, it's addiction.

Kids already use ChatGPT as their search engine. Which is precisely the reason Google doesn't want to compete with one hand tied behind their back.

I legitimately can’t see where this isn’t what happens

> Search is easily Google's least-sticky and most replaceable product. The only reason it gets more usage that other engines like DuckDuckGo and the swathes of other Bing frontends is because it's the default and has the brand appeal for people who don't know better.

This is a wild take, and ignores decades of evidence to the contrary.

Search is very sticky, it's why they push genAI in it so hard, it the product everyone uses. Unfortunately, ddg is still often worse than Google.

AI is a marketing term. It's not a technology.

No. Not in the contemporary common meaning of the term “AI”.

5 years ago you would be technically correct, but today “AI” is only a subset of technologies that used to be included in the term. Namely Large Language Models, Text To Image Models, Text To Video Models, and other forms of generative AI that take in a user text prompt. These other types of statistical models are now simply called Machine Learning Algorithms.

Very few people today say “AI”, and mean “any type of Machine Learning Algorithm”.

Exactly. I haven't used Google search for years and this will surely accelerate awareness of alternatives.

Sadly DuckDuckGo rely on Microsofts's Bingbot scraping data. You block Bingbot in robots.txt, your site not visible in search results in DuckDuckGo.

Yeah, I read this and immediately thought “tying arrangement.” But they’re not CHARGING separately for search and AI, so I doubt a tying theory would hold up in court.

Their search engine is now integrated with Ai. So either google would need to block the search engine or the school if they don't want Ai. Take your pick.

Schools want to use Google Search, but without "AI Overview" or other LLM interfaces in students' search experience.

I overall agree with you, but I'm certain google could just disable the AI summaries on top in these scenarios instead

It would be amazing to have working web search again.

AI lies and gaslighting are driving me up the wall. (Good thing I don't have hypertension.)

Based on the last couple years as a teacher, they've already stopped using Google in favor of AI. AI even helpfully now provides links to real sources they won't bother to open to ensure actually exist

I think that's the largest shortsightedness of google's choice.

All those kids will get used to whatever other search they can use.

Also, schools and parents might appreciate the lack of ads.

I wouldn’t count on that staying that way

That's what every Big Tech company has done when threatened with loss of access to their children: weaponize the children themselves with poor gaslighting to fight the adults so Big Tech gets its way.

Google says it's the big mean school's fault, so the school kids are all gonna band up and try to protest and argue and disrupt because they can't get Google Search.

When Epic didn't get its way... turn the kids against the adults by threatening to take their Fortnite away.

Sad to see Google's playbook become "be as evil as possible"

I know they removed "don't be evil" a while ago now, but they didn't have to immediately become the exact opposite

The students can just log in with a generic Gmail account using a incognito tab.

The AI sumaries ate a huge share of the ads views, so Google is desperate trying to replace that revenue.

Its all very inorganic and forced. This only fuels the idea of it being a bubble that will pop (not if it will pop)

I love old school research using books, however the advantages of connected information cannot be understated.

We could do much better with access to online libraries (which don't exist, apart from the very limited sample from these books accessible using Wikipedia).

Current (blogs and articles and forums) online resources provide information at a rate book search just can't provide.

Don’t you think it irresponsible to delete (modern) media literacy education?

Very narrow minded approach, why not use the tools available? Experimentation is one of the best ways to learn, breaking stuff is a great way to learn. Doesn’t mean that people won’t fall into some traps along the way, but that’s kind of the case with anything.

This is along the lines of “for responsible parenting, never let your kids out of sight”.

I'm sure they will rethink this when Trump's term ends.

That would make sense if the AI summaries from Search were a different product.

Yep:

    Larry Page:     27.4% of voting stock
    Sergey Brin:    25.3% of voting stock
    Other officers:  1.6% of voting stock

Perhaps other big tech companies can also threaten the public with a good time?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Classroom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_for_Education

Google is a pretty essential part of any assignment where independent research is a component.

Images for a slideshow, citations for an essay, research for a project?

Yes, when I was a student I never touched Google and don't understand why anyone would need it. /s

It's true, I used AltaVista and Yahoo! search because Google didn't exist yet.

> Very interesting approach. Basically, you can no longer use Google Search as a way to discover and learn about a subject the old-school way.

If by "interesting" you mean "abusive and coercive."

> I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.

Explain that more please: whose talk is "nonsense"? Google's? Parents'? Schools'?

'Cause it sounds Google is saying this:

> You silly parents and educators, you thought you set educational policy for your students? No, we actually do. Your choices will conform to our business plans of the moment, or we will make your life so painful and difficult that you will "consent" to our demands.

> Did we mention our motto is "don't be evil"? We live our values every day.

> I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.

More generously, it seems like Google just doesn't see a justification for maintaining an AI-free search platform alongside their AI-integrated vision for search.

For a smaller vendor in a competitive market, this decision wouldn't read like coercion. It would just be a roadmap statement that might draw some customers in and drive some towards competitors. You would expect a business to be able to make that kind of decision (a prima facie reasonable one) about how they'll invest in their products and the support infrastructure that surrounds them.

What this story really exposes is how dependent schools have been made on Google specifically and how the idea of independently making choices against their roadmap feels infeasible. It feels like a monopoly to administrators and the public even if it isn't formally marked as such by regulatory agencies.

That itself is worth more people thinking about.

that is an absolutely repugnant take from anyone at Google (I will not attribute this to a legal entity that cannot think, a human being made this call and is accountable for it). They are not educators and should have absolutely zero say in how schools do things.

Google thinks that will be more profitable if they force schools to use AI. They do not think "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense, they think "no AI in schools" is bad for their bottom line, somehow.

well, they gotta get those kids hooked on ai while they're young you know

Google thinks forcing schools to use AI to fuel search will give them great cash. You have far too kind a view on what Google hopes AI will do to schools and not nearly a cynical economic one.

Of course. They have a bridge^W^WAI to sell to you.

This is attempted coercion, plain and simple.

I mean technically I didn't even have Google search when I went to school.

Founders stopped running it, same story as IBM

I'm not a fan of "by ceejayoz" on a link and title I never even submitted, yeah.

edit: Looks like it was undone. Thank you, whoever that was.

The changed link is even more problematic.

Yeah, that is not ok at all. Flagged this post.

Yeah, that's disturbing behavior. Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I kinda assumed the mod team wouldn't blatantly whitewash like this

You could just log in. Seems like you are your own problem.

Get "uBlock origin" bro and ads go away. Also you can click the archive link that op posted and read it there without paywall.

AI doesn't belong in schools. Schools are there to teach thinking, creativity, innovation. AI is the opposite of these.

It is a tool, it can be used within boundaries, but it has zero place in teaching.

It's incredibly obtuse to pretend not to understand that people object to LLM slop, but not everything that can fall under the broad term of "AI".

Would you agree that there is a difference between "search results ranked by AI" and "Magic box that blurts out an answer"?

We do want to teach kids how to do searches, to look at and parse results and basically do "online research", right. Not just blindly trust the magic answer box?

That's absurd. Google Search used to work. Now it doesn't.