A Google Search exec said that one of the company\u2019s biggest opportunities in AI lies in its ability to get to know the user better and personalize its responses. <\/p>\n
The promise is AI that\u2019s uniquely helpful because it knows you. But the risk is AI that feels more like surveillance than service.<\/p>\n
In a recent episode<\/a> of the Limitless podcast, Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, explained that Google\u2019s AI tends to field more queries that are advice-seeking or those where the user is looking for recommendations \u2014 and these types of questions are more likely to benefit from more subjective responses.<\/p>\n \u201cWe think there\u2019s a huge opportunity for our AI to know you better and then be uniquely helpful because of that knowledge,\u201d Stein said in the interview. \u201cAnd one of the things we talked about at [Google\u2019s developer conference] I\/O was how the AI can get a better understanding of you through connected services like Gmail.\u201d<\/p>\n Google has been integrating AI into its apps for some time, starting back when Gemini<\/a> was still known as Bard<\/a>. More recently, it began pulling personal data<\/a> into another AI product, Gemini Deep Research. And Gemini is now infused into Google Workspace apps like Gmail<\/a>, Calendar<\/a> and Drive.<\/p>\n But as Google integrates more personal data<\/a> into its AI \u2014 spanning your emails, documents, photos, location history<\/a>, and browsing behavior \u2014 the line between a helpful assistant and an intrusive one becomes increasingly blurred. And unlike opt-in services, avoiding Google\u2019s data collection may become harder as AI becomes central to its products. <\/p>\n Google\u2019s pitch is that this deep personalization makes the AI far more useful. The idea is that Google\u2019s AI technology could learn from the user\u2019s interactions across Google\u2019s various services, then use that understanding to make more personalized recommendations. For instance, if it learned that a user likes particular products or brands, the AI responses might favor those in its recommendations.<\/p>\n That, Stein said, would be \u201cmuch more useful\u201d than just showing users a more generic list of the best-selling products in a given category. \u201cThat is, I think, very much the vision \u2014 of building something that can be really knowledgeable for you, specifically.\u201d<\/p>\n This idea isn\u2019t all that different from how the \u201cOthers\u201d in the hit Apple TV show Pluribus have gobbled up the world\u2019s knowledge, including intimate details about individuals. When the system interacts with the show\u2019s protagonist, Carol, it uses that data to personalize everything: cooking her favorite meals, adopting a familiar face to handle its communications with her, and otherwise anticipating her needs.<\/p>\n But Carol doesn\u2019t find the personalized responses kind; she finds them invasive. She never consented to sharing her data with the hivemind, yet it knows her better than she\u2019s like. <\/p>\n Similarly, it seems that avoiding Google\u2019s data-gobbling ways will get increasingly difficult in the AI era, and if Google doesn\u2019t get the balance right, the results could feel more creepy than useful.<\/p>\n (To be clear: Google does let you control the apps Gemini uses to make its AI more knowledgeable about you specifically \u2014 it\u2019s under \u201cConnected Apps\u201d in Gemini\u2019s settings<\/a>.)<\/p>\n If you do share app data with Gemini, Google says<\/a> it will save and use that data according to the Gemini privacy policy<\/a>. And that policy reminds users that human reviewers may read some of their data and not to \u201center confidential information that you wouldn\u2019t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve its services.\u201d<\/p>\n But as more data gets ingested into Google\u2019s own hivemind, it\u2019s easy to see how AI could make data privacy more of a gray area.<\/p>\n Google, however, believes it has a solution of sorts.<\/p>\n Stein says that Google will indicate when its AI responses are personalized.<\/p>\n \u201cI think people want to intuitively understand when they\u2019re being personalized\u2013 when information is made for them, versus when [it\u2019s] something that everyone would see if they were to ask this question,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Stein noted, too, that Google could send a push notification to users when a product they had been considering after several days of online research becomes available or is on sale.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are all these ways that Google now, across modes, across kind of different aspects of your life, [is] being incredibly helpful to you\u2026\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I think that\u2019s more of how I think of the future of search than any one specific feature or single form factor.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Google Search exec said that one of the company\u2019s biggest opportunities in AI lies in its ability…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125238,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[365,21913,6301,367,5891,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-163476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-data-privacy","10":"tag-gemini","11":"tag-google","12":"tag-google-search","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}