One of the biggest advantages of Google’s AI is what it already knows about you

One of the company’s biggest opportunities in AI lies in its ability to better recognize the user and personalize their responses, a Google Search executive said.

The promise is that AI will be uniquely useful because it knows you. But the danger lies in artificial intelligence that looks more like a surveillance than a service.

On a recent episode of the Limitless podcast, Robbie Stein, VP of Google Search Product, explained that Google’s AI tends to field more queries that seek advice or ones where the user is looking for recommendations — and those types of questions are likely to benefit from more subjective responses.

“We think there’s a huge opportunity for our AI to get to know you better and then provide help uniquely because of that knowledge,” Stein said in the interview. “And one of the things we talked about in… [Google’s developer conference] I/O was the way AI could better understand you through connected services like Gmail.

Google has been integrating AI into its apps for some time, starting when Gemini was still known as the Bard. More recently, it began pulling personal data into another AI product, Gemini Deep Research. Gemini is now integrated into Google Workspace apps, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Drive.

But as Google incorporates more personal data into its AI — including emails, documents, photos, location history, and browsing behavior — the line between a helpful assistant and an intrusive one is becoming increasingly blurred. And unlike subscription services, avoiding Google’s data collection may become more difficult as AI becomes a key component of its products.

Google’s idea is that this deep personalization makes AI much more useful. The idea is that Google’s AI technology can learn from user interactions across various Google services, and then use that understanding to make more personalized recommendations. For example, if it knows that a user likes certain products or brands, the AI ​​responses may favor those in its recommendations.

Stein said that would be “more useful” than simply showing users a more general list of the best-selling products in a given category. “I think that’s very much the vision — to build something that can be really useful for you, specifically.”

This idea isn’t too different from the idea of ​​the “others” in the hit Apple TV show Multiple It captured global knowledge, including intimate details about individuals. When the system interacts with the show’s heroine, 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.

But Carol doesn’t get the kind of personal responses; You find it invasive. She never agreed to share her data with the human mind, yet he knows her better than she seems.

Likewise, avoiding Google’s data-gobbling tactics looks set to become more difficult in the age of AI, and if Google can’t strike the right balance, the results may seem more scary than helpful.

(For clarification: Google He does It lets you control which apps Gemini uses to make its AI more familiar with you specifically — it’s found under Connected Apps in Gemini’s settings.)

If you share app data with Gemini, Google says it will save that data and use it in accordance with Gemini’s privacy policy. This policy reminds users that human reviewers may read some of their data and not to “enter confidential information that you don’t want the reviewer to see or that Google uses to improve its services.”

But as more data is absorbed into Google’s mind, it’s easy to see how AI could make data privacy more of a gray area.

However, Google believes it has a solution of sorts.

Stein says Google will indicate when its AI responses are personalized.

“I think people want to intuitively understand when they are being personalized — when information is being prepared for them, versus when [it’s] “Something everyone would see if they asked that question,” he said.

Stein also noted that Google could send users a push notification when a product they were considering after several days of online searching becomes available or is on sale.

“There are all these ways that Google is using it now, across situations, across different aspects of your life, [is] “It’s incredibly useful for you…” “And I think that’s more about how I think about the future of search than any one specific feature or form factor,” he said.