What I hate most about AI

 Yes, I used that four letter word. I'm not talking dislike, or a slight annoyance. I HATE some of the newest AI features and how these "bots" bombard my life in an extremely negative way -- torturing us daily. Forcing us to retype, sometimes three times, to not have Autocorrect change the meaning of what we are attempting to say. 

The RED crayon is @GoogleAI, just today, looking at my phone. Two different unrelated Chat conversations.

Google sends an email. Let's chat about Google I/O 2023  and I mark it, because I have been contacting support / Feedback, begging them to shut off the damn digital torture. I have logged in to my settings. The only setting I can find to turn off the "Smart suggestions" is in the Chrome browser, I can't even see that setting to turn off the "Help me write feature" on my phone. I've turned them off so many times in Gmail, the settings menu has changed, moved around and changed wording. Gmail's "Help me write feature, Smart Reply, whatever they are calling it now. 

I'm having a serious and private* (not social media) Chat conversation with my elderly family. We are BRCA1 cancer survivors, my family. We are trying to stay positive in an unoffensively realistic way, and keep in touch, painfully aware of the remaining days we have left to chat and talk. 

                  [ Why that's great! ]-   -   - [ Send a photo! ] -   -   - [ Love that photo! ]

First of all, the "Smart Reply" button that says, Love that photo!, to me, when I am the one who sent the photos (often to have "something" to say, in hopes of being life affirming I send photos). True it's annoying to accidentally hit a "smart" reply button that will annoy my actually smart Boomer Mom who doesn't own a smart phone, use or understand social media, and if she wants to Send a photo! she has to ask Dad, who has a digital camera and uploads them, it's a process. Anyway, she reads, Love that photo! She's with it enough to know she didn't send any photo, so why did I text that?  But, that's only the tiny snowball that starts the avalanche of sad. 

The buttons are large and in the way. If we on either end of the conversation accidentally hit one, (there are four of us in this conversation on various devices), We can't undo this "smart" reply. It's in the Chat thread "forever" until we lose it, or lose them -- actually forever. 

When texting with a loved one, you need to hear their words. And the more trivial and less generic, more personal experience related the actual words from your loved one are, the better, to relate with them. Especially if they are not okay, and the AI is feeding you all these "easy" or "nice" -- actually in the way of the keyboard to type, words. You read them, they are in your head, and it is still not okay at all with them or how anyone feels or what the people in the conversation need to say. It's really, really tragic for someone to be ignoring their parent or their child by hitting the auto reply AI buttons instead of actually choosing the words to say, that the other family member or loved one needs to hear. 

And I can't emphasize this enough. We are talking about important end of life conversations. Possibly some of the last things we may ever say to one another. GOOGLE! PLEASE, PLEASE, TURN THE SMART REPLY BUTTONS OFF!!! 

Okay, I have more, much more, but I'm going to stop now. Because one battle at a time. One human against a bot (an actual army of email and text crawling AI) that can "read" and "type" I don't even know how many times faster than an actual human. There's a limit to what is helpful, and me being angry, at the digital tide invading the details of my life, this isn't it.  +  Uva Be

Tune in next blog post when I rant about Autocorrect! And Google Photos Magic Editor! 

P.s. After I don't know how many searches attempting to turn off Smart Replies, and only finding the settings in the browser, I finally got the search result that seems to have turned them off on my phone. The place with the least space/most easy to accidentally ""click". It was right there on top with settings/more, as if I was/am the crazy lady, again. 

😐Thanks if someone moved the setting to turn them off so that it was easier to find. 

P.s. #2 weeks later. I have turned smart replies a.k.a. those boxes of crap filling up the screen space on my phone twice now. Three times if you count me driving to the air-port and someone who just landed calling me and me hitting the box that creepily said. "I'm driving, can't chat now."