In Gmail, Gemini can craft and tweak emails, summarize email chains, organize your inbox, and create AI Overviews of your email. The amount of AI you get depends on whether you’re paying for higher AI limits, but everyone gets some, and these features are constantly expanding. But maybe you don’t want the AI generating hallucinatory summaries in your email. Turning that off is an exercise in frustration because there is no granularity—plenty of features have simple toggles in the Gmail settings but not Gemini.
To disable Gemini features in Gmail, you have to turn them all off through what Google calls “Smart Features,” and there are two ways to do that. One of them nukes a ton of Gmail functionality, and neither is explained very well.
In the Gmail settings, there’s a checkbox toggle for Smart Features that disables Gemini, but it also kills a number of popular features that predate the AI boom. Using this option means giving up inbox filtering (tabs for primary, social, promotions, etc.), Smart Compose, package tracking, and more. Maybe you thought you only had 20 unread emails, but now you have 500 because all those social updates you ignored are suddenly cluttering your main inbox. After disabling Gemini and losing all those features, Gmail offers you a second chance with a pop-up nag that reenables all those features, including Gemini.
The other Smart Features toggle, one click deeper in the settings, is the Workspace version. This one turns off Gemini in addition to personalized Drive search, copying loyalty cards to Wallet and Calendar event extraction from Gmail. This is supposed to remove Gemini from Drive as well, but you may not see any difference after flipping the switch because the Gemini UI elements don’t go away. Clicking on any of them will produce a prompt to turn Smart Features (and Gemini) back on.
There are two ways to disable Gemini in Gmail, and neither is labeled as such.
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So disabling Gemini features means contending with vaguely worded menus and the loss of unrelated features, which looks like a combination of “obstruction” and “forced action” dark patterns. “Clearly, that’s not acceptable,” Potel said. “The fact that it changes your usage parameters when you disable Gemini is obviously meant to prevent you from disabling it.”