And let’s be brutally honest for a second: Google’s Gemini system is not that technology. Not in its current form, anyhow, nor in the way Google is scrambling to cram it into every possible nook and cranny and have it act as the end-all answer for every imaginable tech purpose.
What’s most frustrating of all is how few people — including, most of all, Google itself and the other companies pushing similar sorts of systems — are willing or able to acknowledge this.
The reality, though, is that large-language models like Gemini and ChatGPT are wildly impressive at a very small set of specific, limited tasks. They work wonders when it comes to unambiguous data processing, text summarizing, and other low-level, closely defined and clearly objective chores. That’s great! They’re an incredible new asset for those sorts of purposes.
But everyone in the tech industry seems to be clamoring to brush aside an extremely real asterisk to that — and that’s the fact that Gemini, ChatGPT, and other such systems simply don’t belong everywhere. They aren’t at all reliable as “creative” tools or tools intended to parse information and provide specific, factual answers. And we, as actual human users of the services associated with this stuff, don’t need this type of technology everywhere — and might even be actively harmed by having it forced into so many places where it doesn’t genuinely belong.
