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.

I’m definitely not alone in this reaction to Gemini creep. Recent studies have indicated that young people are less and less enthused about AI, and that they dislike it more the more they use the tools. Constantly nagging people to use a thing that they don’t like generally doesn’t go well. Just ask Microsoft, the company that spent two years stuffing Copilot into every nook and cranny it could find. The backlash has been loud, and the company is now walking some of that back.

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.