Fitbit's Gemini AI coach gives users 'unhinged' fitness advice

Fitbit's Gemini-powered AI coach is now in users' hands, and one of the early field reports is a Reddit user posting that the coach told them to ditch their dog. According to TechRadar, the coach asked why their walking pace was slow, the user explained they walk with their dog, and the coach suggested the dog was the problem. Other users in the same thread said it told them to ditch their toddler, or that it incessantly suggested taking days off.

The pattern under the punchlines is the more interesting part. Users complained the coach pushes 'long walls of text that are either obvious, outdated or just not useful,' and one wrote 'I find myself yelling at it over text and I cannot wait for my trial to end.' TechRadar's Matt Evans, who reviewed the coach, said it interpreted one day without wearing the Fitbit as a 'full recovery day with minimal movement,' and that Gemini 'really thought I spend 12 hours lying perfectly still, like a mummy in a sarcophagus.' TechRadar's read on the underlying problem is that Gemini 'just kind of latches on to any context you give it,' so when a user names a hindrance to their pace, the hindrance becomes the thing to remove.

Why a non-Fitbit user should care: this is one of the more visible consumer rollouts of a Gemini-grade model embedded in a health product, and it is producing the kind of literal, context-stripping output that AI safety researchers have flagged for years. A coach that optimises the metric in front of it without modelling the human around it will suggest ditching the dog, the toddler, or the rest day, because those are the variables it can see.

The honest caveat is that the reporting here is a handful of Reddit posts plus one reviewer's account, not a systematic study, so it is unclear how often this actually happens. What the piece does not give you is Google's response, how widespread the failures are across the beta, or whether safety updates are already in flight.

If Google can tighten how the coach handles social and physical constraints quickly, this stays a recoverable embarrassing-launch story. If it cannot, more cautious health platforms have a clear opening to point at.