Gemini is an increasingly good chatbot, but it’s still a bad assistant

Op-ed: Google's generative AI is not ready to serve as your virtual assistant.

Apr 1, 2025 - 19:26

Gemini is an increasingly good chatbot, but it’s still a bad assistant

Google announced its intention to unify its generative AI efforts under the Gemini brand at the tail end of 2023, and it has been full steam ahead ever since. In 2025, Google Assistant is being phased out and replaced with Gemini. As Google, Amazon, and others move toward a world in which all virtual assistants are based on generative AI, it's reasonable to consider if this is actually a good idea. Despite promises of "smarter" AI and ever-increasing token limits, these robots still have a fundamental flaw that may make them bad assistants: They lie.

They don't set out to lie, of course, because they don't know what a "lie" is. These systems attempt to generate the most plausible next token to build an output. Because of this, generative AI is non-deterministic—you can't predict the output, and even running the same prompt multiple times will offer varying responses.

This can look impressively like thinking sometimes, but it also leads to frequent hallucinations. That's why the iPhone said Luigi Mangione was dead and Google told people to put glue on pizza. GenAI proponents like Google and Apple have been trying to curb the chaos of confabulations, but this may always be a problem because of the nature of the underlying technology.

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