In May, I asked Google\u2019s chatbot, Gemini, to write a birthday letter to my best friend. Within seconds, it spat out the most impressive piece of AI writing I have ever encountered. Instead of reading as soulless, machine-generated text, the letter felt unnervingly like something I might\u2019ve actually written. \u201cYou\u2019re probably rolling your eyes,\u201d the letter read, after a sentence that my friend would most definitely have rolled his eyes at. All I had typed into the chatbot was a nine-word prompt containing my friend\u2019s first name and the age he was turning. But the letter referenced real moments from our friendship. One paragraph recounted a conversation we had shared on the eve of college graduation; another reflected on a challenging period we had navigated together. Gemini had even included his correct birth date.<\/p>\n
I hadn\u2019t planned to let AI write the birthday letter for me. When I opened Google Drive to type it up myself, Gemini popped up and volunteered to help out. Since the spring, when I first signed up for a free trial of Google\u2019s AI Pro subscription\u2014normally $20 a month\u2014Gemini has followed me around the Googleverse. The tool is akin to a souped-up version of Microsoft Clippy: In Gmail, it offers to summarize long threads and draft entire messages. In Sheets, it volunteers to assist with data analysis, generating colorful bar graphs at the click of a button. But Gemini has proved most alluring in Drive, where the chatbot can automatically find and consult relevant files before generating text. That\u2019s how Gemini was able to whip up such a good birthday letter: It already knew a lot about me (and, by association, my friend).<\/p>\n
Of all the things that chatbots excel at, they have generally not been very reliable for individualized tasks. Ask an AI tool to write an essay on, say, the history of popcorn, and you will likely get a decent response. But ask it to write a speech for your sister\u2019s wedding, and the result will probably be quite poor. You might get a better speech if you feed the chatbot a decade of your texts and emails, her wedding website, and previous toasts you\u2019ve given for other loved ones. But that process takes time and effort, which most people don\u2019t put in.<\/p>\n
Tech executives dream instead of hyper-personalized chatbots that automatically have access to all of the information they might ever need. After sucking up the web to build models capable of generating coherent text, AI companies are now mining our personal troves of data to teach chatbots everything there is to know about us. Google, with its colossal data empire in tow, is particularly well positioned to lead the way. If OpenAI introduced us to the Hallmark-card version of AI writing, Google is ushering in a new chapter where chatbots are capable of drafting the sort of intimate letters you might write to your best friend.<\/p>\n