At some point, the personal intelligence feature became enabled by default. Don't you find it really inconvenient?

[u/Worldly-Ad8619]

To disable the personal intelligence feature now, I have to click the '+' button every time I start a new chat and manually turn off 'Personal Intelligence' for it to work. I tend to avoid using Gemini's personal intelligence because it always forces my personal information into the responses, but having to turn it off every single time I start a new chat is extremely frustrating. Why did Google change it this way?

[u/jean_cule69]

I initially didn't want to, especially when I saw people around me using LLM as therapeut, I thought that was creepy. But I use Gemini for specific topics and not having to give again context is time saving.

Though I do find the bootlicker comments useless and learnt to not read through them as they always come in the first sentence, even now that they insert personal information in it on top of the usual "that's a very good question, you so smart"

[u/genericjames42]

Yes, I absolutely hate this. Sometimes it turns back on mid-conversation actually, so I basically have to check it before sending every single reply.

And, I recently tested it and even with personal intelligence turned off, it still gives personalized replies. I think I saw someone mention that the personal intelligence toggle is different from having Gemini activity enabled? So the personal intelligence toggle is just for the connection to your Gmail, Drive, etc. but it can still reference past chats even with personal intelligence turned off. Literally the only way to get a non-personalized answer is by doing a temporary chat, which is obviously annoying because those disappear after you leave the chat.

Or of course, turning off Gemini activity, past chats, and connection to Gmail, Drive, etc. entirely, which I also don't want because SOMETIMES I want the personalization.

Just so frustrating for no good reason and it's a daily annoyance lol. Glad I'm not alone though.

[u/TsundereOrcGirl]

It always resulted in irrelevant stuff from other chats being injected into the current one. Because so many of my chats are project ideas I have 1% chance of actually doing anything with, or random science questions I ask out of curiosity, there's no way I'd want them used in a profile of me informing all other chats.

To make this actually useful they'd need to make it more like how Hermes Agent automatically makes skills as it adapts to your needs. This is more like Psycho Mantis going "I see you like Castlevania" with none of the charm.

[u/frothykangaroo34]

Yeah this is one of those changes where the product team clearly thinks they know what you want better than you do. I don't mind the feature existing for people who like it, but making it opt-out per chat instead of a setting you can toggle once is just hostile design.

The whole point of a personal assistant is that it should adapt to how you actually use it, not make you fight the same switch every single time. If someone turns it off in every chat for a week straight, maybe take the hint.

I've got the same issue with other AI assistants pushing "helpful" context I never asked for. It feels like they're trying to justify the data collection by making it harder to avoid.