Shove your AI features where the sun don’t shine

I opened an email today and was greeted with this:

I actually pay Google money — and have been for a while. I pay for Google One and, believe it or not, even for YouTube Premium. Which, if internet is to be believed,¹ makes me one of about 6 people on the planet.

Anyway, I like to think that when you pay a fair price for a software product, you should:

Not be the guinea pig
Not be shown ads
Not be upsold to too aggressively

Look, if I pay for a git GUI client (and I do), I get that the company sends me an occasional email about their other products. It’s great marketing for them, and it does sometimes make sense for me while also not bothering me too often.

But if my git GUI client started shoving some new feature in my face every time I make a commit, and the shoving is something like 20% of the UI and about 90% of the clickable space (that whole “Suggested Reply” area at the bottom is one giant button), then they've crossed a line — by about a mile.

Note that there is no “I don’t want this” button in the gmail UI above. I went to settings in the hopes I’ll be able to turn it off, but I found nothing. Increasingly agitated, I searched the internet, but only found other similarly confused users asking in support forums, getting replies that boil down to delete you account. Next, I found a single knowledge base article that’s about smart compose in Docs, not gmail.

I still hope there’s a way to turn this off, but my point it that it should be way easier.

Dear top brass at Google and other companies: wake the fuck up. People will simply stop using your products (they’re just a click away, remember?²). Chasing after incremental revenue at the expense of base revenue will eventually bite you in the ass.

But that’s just the Economics 101 reason not to do this. The other one is this: I’m pretty sure people actually hate this? You have the data, you know. I, for one, would loathe myself for using a feature that auto-replies to people I know, and if I learned that a person I work with usually can’t be bothered to write a short reply and instead just hits a button to slop-reply to me, I’d have a strong reason to reconsider my relationship to them.

So, the thing is, as one of your “best” customers (remember: I pay for YouTube-fucking-Premium), I now have a strong rational and emotional motivation to switch away. Gmail is no longer the far-and-away leader of email — there are fantastic contenders in this space, like ProtonMail and FastMail. They are paid, but so is your offering when used at my level.

So either your shenanigans with AI-in-people’s-faces bring in enough new users to offset people like me, or I’m a total outlier and people actually love this stuff in their email and nobody’s going anywhere.

Well, I know I’m not the only one:

But maybe it’s just a tiny minority?

AI can be incredibly useful. All I’m saying is that putting 2 massive buttons around every email in order to summarize it and to slop-reply to it is of little value.

Ok, diatribe’s over, folks.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

It’s not. ↩
Well, they’re not just a click away anymore since we have so much useful data tied to companies these days. But it’s still easier to move between email providers than it is to move between apartments, for example. ↩

— Filip Hráček
December 2025

Filip is a programming buff with formal training in journalism. He worked in Silicon Valley, now he’s based in Prague. He builds games, teaches programming, explains things, and creates silly software experiments.

His main project these days is GIANT ROBOT GAME (Steam link).

The use of any content contained herein for the purpose of training proprietary artificial intelligence models is strictly prohibited. Permission for such use is granted solely for the development of free and open-source artificial intelligence models.

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