ChatGPT Inspires Hate, Gemini Inspires Nothing

“The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.”

ChatGPT gets criticized for having too much personality, while Google’s Gemini has none. Google lost its quirk years ago when it stopped hiring weirdos, and its AI team shifted from playing to win to simply playing not to lose because they were terrified of pissing someone off. Instead of building something polarizing, they built something people feel indifferent toward. That’s death, both in love and in product creation.

A product has to polarize in some way to galvanize true believers, especially in consumer tech, where people form an intimate relationship with what they use daily. In the enterprise, this matters less, decisions are ruled by the P&L. But in consumer, if your product doesn’t provoke love or hate, you’re building a forgettable commodity, forced to compete on margins, and destined to become fungible and forgettable.

Gemini lacks quirk, just as Google did after 2015/2016 when the company turned self-hating. At least when people complained that ChatGPT was too supportive or too caring, it generated headlines. When OpenAI tried to deprecate GPT-4o, people protested because they were attached to it. I’ve yet to see anyone express attachment to Gemini, its personality, its quirks, or even the experience of using it.