We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

lol

How to "opt out":

• Open Gmail desktop in browser
• Settings icon
• View all settings
• General tab
• Unchecked Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet

I have yet to see any of these news sites show evidence that this setting is for allowing training with your data. That's not what the setting itself says, it seems like this is just a panicked ripple of clickbait titles sweeping rapidly across social media on a wave of AI dopamine.

If it sees my attachments then all it's gonna get is a lot of very poorly written smut. Happy to help make the lying machine worse, guys.

So glad I switched email and calender services years ago.

Remember, Google is not alone:

The age of accelerated enshitification is upon us (has been for a minute)

I use thunderbird but I don't know what email server to use!! No outlook because fuck Microsoft too, but my Gmail gotta go too if it's this blatantly intrusive. Who do I use?? I'm too poor to host myself.

I only have one fake google account on an isolated VM with dedicated VPN. For the rare cases it's unavoidable for something. Whoever actually uses gmail, will get what they pay for.

But this is probably anti-AI-ragebait anyway.

Cool it is being trained on a ton of spam and vendor emails..

Who would have guessed?