Gemini has a creep problem.<\/p>\n
A few years ago, that little sparkle icon started showing up in all of our Google apps. Gemini in your inbox! Gemini in your Google Drive! It was slow at first, and easy enough to tune out, but something has changed in the past few months. Gemini is creeping. It\u2019s showing up in all kinds of places at a relentless pace, and personally, it\u2019s starting to really cheese me off.<\/p>\n
The AI-everywhere fatigue is familiar to anyone who has ever used Windows 11. Microsoft went absolutely bananas putting Copilot shortcuts onto every surface it could find, to the extreme irritation<\/a> of many users. Likewise, we will doubtlessly hear about all kinds of new Gemini features at this week\u2019s Google I\/O conference, and I\u2019m praying that Google has learned from Microsoft\u2019s mistakes as it unleashes them on our Workspace apps. Nobody likes a creep.<\/p>\n I\u2019m actually kind of a Gemini enjoyer, too. I used it to vibe-code an app to figure out which chores I have time for in a given day. I chat with Gemini on every Android phone I test, and I\u2019ve started downloading the app on iPhones, too. That might put me in, like, the top 10 percent of Gemini users who don\u2019t work at Google. I\u2019ve even come around to the AI overviews Google sticks on top of every search result these days. Sure, there were the early glue-on-your-pizza days<\/a>. And they\u2019re probably contributing to the death of the open web<\/a>. But lately I\u2019m finding them reliable enough when the stakes are low. I\u2019ll Google how often to water my lavender plants, or how long to bake potato wedges at 400 degrees; so far AI overviews haven\u2019t killed my lavender or undercooked my potatoes.<\/p>\n But everyone has their limit, and I think the newest Gemini intrusion into Google Docs is when I reached mine. It\u2019s a persistent sparkle icon at the bottom of the window, and if you make the mistake of mousing over it, you\u2019ll get a full-on toolbar with suggested prompts<\/a> to get Gemini to write for you. Blogging is my craft, thank you very much, so I shut that shit right down. Now, even the Gemini icons that I\u2019d been able to tune out before are starting to bother me. I guess at some point I gave Chrome permission to put a Gemini shortcut in the menu bar at the top of my MacBook homescreen, because there\u2019s a little sparkle up there, staring at me all the time. When did that happen? Was I tricked? It\u2019s all a bit Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. They\u2019re everywhere.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the matter of AI as a threat to the developer community \u2014 you know, the people Google addresses at I\/O. Tech companies are laying off software engineers left and right, saying they don\u2019t need as many warm bodies as AI coding tools have gotten better. I\u2019m not sure that Gemini offering to help write your cover letter is much comfort when you\u2019re applying for jobs currently being decimated by AI.<\/p>\n