Gemini is in danger of going full Copilot

Gemini has a creep problem.

A few years ago, that little sparkle icon started showing up in all of our Google apps. Gemini in your inbox! Gemini in your Google Drive! It was slow at first, and easy enough to tune out, but something has changed in the past few months. Gemini is creeping. It’s showing up in all kinds of places at a relentless pace, and personally, it’s starting to really cheese me off.

The AI-everywhere fatigue is familiar to anyone who has ever used Windows 11. Microsoft went absolutely bananas putting Copilot shortcuts onto every surface it could find, to the extreme irritation of many users. Likewise, we will doubtlessly hear about all kinds of new Gemini features at this week’s Google I/O conference, and I’m praying that Google has learned from Microsoft’s mistakes as it unleashes them on our Workspace apps. Nobody likes a creep.

I’m actually kind of a Gemini enjoyer, too. I used it to vibe-code an app to figure out which chores I have time for in a given day. I chat with Gemini on every Android phone I test, and I’ve started downloading the app on iPhones, too. That might put me in, like, the top 10 percent of Gemini users who don’t work at Google. I’ve even come around to the AI overviews Google sticks on top of every search result these days. Sure, there were the early glue-on-your-pizza days. And they’re probably contributing to the death of the open web. But lately I’m finding them reliable enough when the stakes are low. I’ll Google how often to water my lavender plants, or how long to bake potato wedges at 400 degrees; so far AI overviews haven’t killed my lavender or undercooked my potatoes.

But everyone has their limit, and I think the newest Gemini intrusion into Google Docs is when I reached mine. It’s a persistent sparkle icon at the bottom of the window, and if you make the mistake of mousing over it, you’ll get a full-on toolbar with suggested prompts to get Gemini to write for you. Blogging is my craft, thank you very much, so I shut that shit right down. Now, even the Gemini icons that I’d been able to tune out before are starting to bother me. I guess at some point I gave Chrome permission to put a Gemini shortcut in the menu bar at the top of my MacBook homescreen, because there’s a little sparkle up there, staring at me all the time. When did that happen? Was I tricked? It’s all a bit Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. They’re everywhere.

And then there’s the matter of AI as a threat to the developer community — you know, the people Google addresses at I/O. Tech companies are laying off software engineers left and right, saying they don’t need as many warm bodies as AI coding tools have gotten better. I’m not sure that Gemini offering to help write your cover letter is much comfort when you’re applying for jobs currently being decimated by AI.

This is all before considering that companies like Google aren’t winning themselves any popularity contests as they push to build massive data centers around the country. But without even getting into all that, it’s just a bad user experience to constantly badger people into adopting tools they don’t want. I expect that kind of behavior from a Meta app, not a piece of software I use for work. I don’t want to “ask Gmail” when I open my inbox, I want to type in three keywords and find the email I’m looking for. I don’t want to chat with Gemini about my Chrome tabs. I don’t want to “learn the highs and lows” of a folder in my Google Drive. I want AI tools when I find them useful. Otherwise, I just want this stuff out of my face, and I don’t think I’m alone.

Photography by Allison Johnson / noti.group