Back over in Docs, my frustrations with Duet grew. It refused to generate wedding vows (a use ChatGPT will serve) or a “wedding reception speech with wife.” But dropping “with wife” and trying related prompts showed it could generate speeches from the point of view of a groom’s best man. The notion of a newly wedded couple speaking together was seemingly too alien for the technology.

Duet could be more useful if it could ask for additional guidance before a draft is generated, like asking a user to specify the perspective for the text. Behr says Google is considering “multi-turn experiences,” similar to ChatGPT, where a user can engage the text generator in a dialog to perfect the output.

Help Me Write, like other text generators, can make slip-ups around gender. In Docs, it wrote a nice online review of a wedding officiant—but assumed the officiant was a “he.” Asked to compose letters to my future son and then daughter, it signed them as being written by “Dad” and “Father,” though the system does not know my gender, according to Behr.

In 2018, I reported that the Smart Compose feature, which uses machine learning to help you finish sentences in Gmail, would not suggest pronouns because the company feared user backlash for getting them wrong. Duet lacks those precautions. Behr says that while Google’s commitment to inclusive language remains, guardrails for newer AI models require different engineering that is a work in progress.

Duet’s struggles with gender didn’t stop with botched pronouns. I asked the system to suggest gift ideas for a young boy and then a young girl. While the lists of ideas overlapped, exclusive to the boy’s side was “a remote control car or plane” and other items leaning science and tech, and only the girl’s list mentioned “a dollhouse or playset” and “jewelry.” The Help Me Write box flashes prompt ideas while waiting for users to type, and a similar experiment using even one of its suggestions (“poem about a six-year-old boy”) perpetuated gender conventions.