Like every other tech company out there, Google is doing their darnedest to inject AI everywhere they can, and that includes your Gmail inbox. I’m sure you’ve seen it by now: You open an email in Gmail, and the very first thing you see is an “AI Overview” that tries to summarize the email for you — regardless of how long, or short, it might be.
Fortunately for those of us who prefer to actually read our emails for ourselves, it’s pretty easy to remove these overviews:
- When you’re in Gmail, click on the gear icon in the upper-right corner to open the “Quick settings” panel.
- Click on “See all settings” to bring up the main “Settings” screen.
- Make sure you’re on the “General” tab and scroll down to “Google Workspace smart features.”
- Click on “Manage Workspace smart feature settings.” This will launch a popup titled “Google Workspace smart features.”
- The popup contains two toggles: “Smart features in Google Workspace” and “Smart features in other Google products.” Chances are, both are activated.
- To remove AI overviews, deactivate the “Smart features in Google Workspace” toggle. While you’re in there, though, you might as well deactivate both toggles. When you’re done, click on “Save” at the bottom of the popup to apply your changes.
You should no longer see AI overviews at the top of your emails when you read them. There are, of course, several caveats:
- The above instructions are for personal Gmail accounts. If your Gmail account is a corporate or work account, then you might not be able to make the above changes, depending on how your email administrator has configured your account.
- Deactivating “Smart features in Google Workspace” does more than just remove AI overviews. For example, it also prevents events in Gmail from appearing in Google Calendar.
- Finally, deactivating “Smart features in other Google products” prevents similar integrations with other Google products.
In other words, be sure to double-check that deactivating the above toggles doesn’t mess with your workflows. That, or be prepared to find workarounds if you can no longer do some things that you once relied on.
Finally, while you’re on the “General” tab mentioned in step 3 above, you might also notice a checkbox labeled “Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet.” Based on all of the above, you might be temped to disable this option, too, since it allows Google to use your content and activity to “provide smart features” and “personalize your experience.” Google’s language here is a bit unclear, though, and the company insists that these smart features are not used to train AI models.
You can certainly turn off these smart features anyway if you want to reduce the likelihood of Google scanning your emails. Doing so, however, disables several features including spellcheck, automatic writing suggestions, package tracking, desktop notifications, and inbox categories. Personally, I find several of these smart features useful enough to keep them around, privacy implications notwithstanding, but everyone should decide for themselves.