MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google pushed back against viral reports regarding Gmail privacy on Friday, assuring panicked users that the company does not read their emails to train AI, but rather employs “very observant robots” to memorize them instead.

Following accusations that the tech giant uses private messages to teach its computer programs, Google clarified that while the system scans training data to make features work, no human eyes are involved.

“There is a huge difference between ‘reading’ and ‘processing every single word you type for all eternity,'” said Marcus Vane, Google’s Director of Semantics and Hair Splitting. “Reading is what humans do. When our computers scan your medical records and love letters to learn how to write better, that’s just ‘digital glancing.’ It’s totally different.”

The company emphasized that users concerned about privacy have full control. To opt out of the data collection, customers simply need to disable “smart features.” According to the settings menu, this includes spell check, automatic sorting, and the ability to find any email sent before yesterday.

“We believe in choice,” said Sarah Jenkins, Vice President of Impossible Trade-offs. “You can have total privacy, or you can have a computer that knows how to spell ‘restaurant.’ You cannot have both. That would be greedy.”

At publishing time, Google’s AI had successfully auto-completed a user’s resignation letter before they had even decided to quit.

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