Rude Gmail Smart Reply

Haha, thanks! Looks good to me! Fuck off.

Gmail recently introduced Smart Reply, which provides a row of buttons to answer emails quickly with canned replies suggested by an AI. This has the potential to make email more efficient and improve people's workflows. After all, isn't email just a to-do list other people can edit?

But what does it mean to let an AI control our affect? Maybe using scripts to communicate will encourage us to treat each other like robots, exchanging predefined commands. It's already how people sometimes talk to cashiers, waiters, and customer service workers.

Critics of the smart reply feature are concerned that it sanitizes our language in a way that makes email correspondence insincere and impersonal. A AI-generated suggestions encourage a least common denominator way of speaking flattens the range of ways people have to express themselves into something that's always vaguely nice, kinda peppy, and not overly effusive.

This Chrome extension replaces this algorithmic sanitization of expression with something more, well, foul.

Source code available on github: https://github.com/jonathanzong/rude-gmail