Yahoo's AI-Generated Email Summaries: A "Solution" Searching for a Problem

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Last week I made the mistake of signing out of my personal Yahoo email account. When I signed back in, I was locked into Yahoo's new email interface. I had been dodging the change for a while, but now I had no option to turn back.

And like many of the company's innovations through the years (I see you there, Yahoo Fantasy Sports), this one felt like a clear downgrade. Emails sorted into categories; conversation threads instead of lists; lists reduced into icons — all hard 'no's from me.

The most jarring new feature popped into my inbox a few days later. On top of a newsletter from a local golf course, a prominently placed, AI-generated info box "summarized" the content of the email. The summary was "Created by Yahoo Mail" and highlighted "the most important information from your message," according to a little info pop-up.

Let's see what it pulled from the three short paragraphs of the business email:

"SLGC has more golfers booking tee times as the weather warms, and reminds you to call for reservations, with a note on the golf season running from March 24th to October 26th..."

Now, are Yahoo's email summaries providing a service that we really need? A poorly written run-on sentence that saves us the few seconds required to read an actual email from a person or company we've signed up to hear from?

Of more concern was the rest of the info in that Yahoo pop-up. "The technology is new and may make mistakes."

With that said, here's the rest of the AI summary:

"...and that USGA handpicky expires on April 15th."

"Handpicky"?

Does anyone know what "handpicky" is? It's AI's interpretation of golf "handicap." Nowhere in the actual email was the term misspelled as "handpicky," so this was a pure AI creation — or hallucination, as they've come to be known.

So, in summary, the service is useless. It can't be trusted with a relatively insignificant block of text about golf dates — why should anyone trust it to pull the key points from something vital?

For research purposes, I opened an important email to see the results.

This one was from a client, and it let me know that more content would be delivered over the next few days.

Here's how Yahoo summarized it:

"Await assignments from [client]."

OK, thanks.

Is it too much to ask for some of these AI features to be rolled out when they are actually ready to perform a helpful function? Because right now there are plenty of detailed, carefully written emails being shredded by a poorly functioning feature pushed onto thousands of users.