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How to disable or avoid intrusive AI
- rad-b 2mo agoSuch a cool guide to such a bizarre problem we live in… Companies forcing features that nobody wants, but that are also expensive to operate and cost real money to run? Market can definitely stay irrational for long.
- bluefirebrand 2mo agoI really do wonder if the market is being irrational or if we just cannot see what they are I suspect that many people dislike AI but are begrudgingly using it. I would put money very few people are completely avoiding it. It's very hard to avoid now anyways. Maybe the AI company strategy is really just "make it so invasive in life it's so difficult to avoid and expensive enough to revert that companies and governments will never go back anyways"
- graceful6800 2mo agoNobody, absolutely nobody wants or likes overlapping rainbow animated "ask AI" buttons plastered over every available inch of screen space. Nobody wants or likes useful features being removed and replaced with colorful bouncing "ask AI" buttons.
- doug_durham 2mo agoYou can't say that. Also that isn't happening.
- gilrain 2mo agoAre you their dad?
- BeetleB 2mo ago> I suspect that many people dislike AI but are begrudgingly using it. (Sadly,) many normal folks use ChatGPT in lieu of Google search. I'm continually surprised to, over and over, hear from personal friends that they planned their vacation using ChatGPT. They were not begrudgingly using it.
- Sharlin 2mo agoChoosing to visit (or use the app) ChatGPT or Claude is very different from having terribly integrated and usually useless AI in every single app and website.
- freeone3000 2mo agoNobody using it is actually the ideal outcome. AI features are added, at no additional cost to the consumer, to extract money from investors. If customers began using the product, this feature would actually start having an ongoing cost.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- marginalia_nu 2mo agoThing with investor money is that after a while the investors start asking where their dividends are at. If you put all that money toward building features nobody asked for, you're in for a rough time.
- Nextgrid 2mo ago> after a while the investors start asking where their dividends are at By then, a new fad will come in and you can just pivot to it. We went from "engagement" (with no concrete plans to monetize said engagement), through a brief period of "blockchain" and now finally AI.
- fragmede 2mo ago> engagement" (with no concrete plans to monetize said engagement) Google and Meta have made billions monetizing said engagement
- marginalia_nu 2mo agoEh, this is true prior to an IPO, but listed companies (like every single one doing this shit) are very much beholden to shareholders and quarterly reports.
- freeone3000 2mo agoWoe betide the company cursed with smart investors
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- Legend2440 2mo agoMany people do like AI tools and use them regularly. ChatGPT has nearly a billion weekly active users. It's just that another group of people absolutely hates the idea of AI and wants it to go away.
- gumby271 2mo agoI think people like AI tools when it's their choice to engage with them and they set the terms. I have a good experience with Claude largely because I choose when to use it and when I don't care about it's existence, its gone. But the stupid glowing, animated, overlapping Copilot button in Word is the dumbest thing imaginable. I don't want it, and I cant stop being reminded of it. The simple distinction of pro vs anti ai isn't the root cause, its about individual control and choice which can span both of those stances.
- andrekandre 2mo ago> I think people like AI tools when it's their choice to engage with them and they set the terms. exactly, stop shoving ai in my face and let me go to it when i want/need it
- skinfaxi 2mo agoHow many people prefer having an AI gate customer support, for instance? I don't think we are talking about two groups here.
- Legend2440 2mo agoI'm not opposed to it on principle, but it has to actually work. Every AI phone assistant I've talked to has been pretty terrible, even compared to modern LLMs like ChatGPT voice mode.
- skinfaxi 2mo agoHow about if AI was the gate for emergency services dispatch?
- doug_durham 2mo agoThis whole "nobody wants" narrative is getting tiresome. It is provably false, and is just a rhetorical tool.
- mrtesthah 2mo agoProve that they do want them, then. If I personally wanted to use generative AI, I’d query an agent app on my computer or load ChatGPT in a browser. I wouldn’t want my email client proactively spewing random words into the text area on its own. And I certainly don’t want every bit of information on my screen continuously streamed to a corporate cloud server so that I can ultimately be profiled and surveilled.
- BeetleB 2mo ago> Prove that they do want them, then. Look at OpenAI revenue just over a year ago. Most of that was not for LLM coding. Loads of non-technical people I know are paid subscribers $20/mo to ChatGPT (not API, but their actual chat product).
- Sharlin 2mo agoThat's beside the point. It is obvious that this discussion is about idiotic AI integrations plastered to every website and application, not about choosing to use ChatGPT or Claude on your own terms.
- doug_durham 1mo agoI want them, which violates the Universal qualifier on your statement. Discrete math for the win.
- uhohherewegoaga 2mo agowe’ve reached the stage of market consolidation where corporations dictate consumer behavior, not vice versa
- TeMPOraL 2mo agoWe've long been there. Most technology markets are supply driven. People buy what's made available on the market and learn to cope with it. That's big part of why people hate computers so much, and why feigning ignorance about basic device operations is a point of pride for many a normies.
- Sharlin 2mo agoBeen there for a long time. A lot of stuff, especially tech, is not bought because of an existing need, but because marketing made you want it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 2mo agoAlternative hypothesis: people do gradually use these features, but HN became a weird anti-AI bubble for some reason. I mean, many of the features had previous pre-AI attempts. They all sucked much more. This is the first time they have a remote chance of working (but in many cases, timidity or cheapening out is still making them barely usable - which is why 99% of the cases it's still much, much better to throw one of the three SOTA LLMs at the app to operate it (or on its data) from the outside).
- nekusar 2mo agoShitty LLM chatbots providing unhelpful (read: lies) customer service is even worse than some Phillippeens or Indian support with terrible scripting and half-broken engrish. At least you could deal with those fucks with demanding a manager or similar. The LLMs will always do the worse option to customers, to extract more money. Burn'em all to the ground.
- TeMPOraL 2mo agoDon't pin that on LLMs, it has nothing to do with them. Shitty chatbots became a thing a few years before LLMs. The LLM variant is an improvement for users - it's more typo-tolerant, and more likely to understand what the user actually wants, before it flat out refuses because of organizational policies. > The LLMs will always do the worse option to customers, to extract more money. Burn'em all to the ground. That's a ridiculous take. The models are very capable. What they actually do depends entirely on constraints set up by the companies deploying it. If the AI features on some site "always do the worse option to customers", it's not a problem with LLMs - there is a human being in the company, that choose to fuck over their customers. Same is true about pre-LLM support. It's not people from India who are at fault for your shitty support - it's the executives in the Western company that explicitly decided to outsource their customer support to a call center on a different continent, and they're also the ones who decided that "terrible scripting and half-broken english" is the level of support they will offer to their customers. Same with manufacturing - "Made in China" is a synonym of bad quality, but it's not because of China. The brands are free to seek out any combination of quality and price, and it's them who choose to dial quality down to minimum. Factories don't care what's in the spec, they do work to spec. Same with LLM chatbots. Prompt them to be unhelpful and prevent them from accessing important information or paging actual people, and they will be useless. Not the fault of LLM. Yes, it's my pet peeve, and it's been such long before LLMs. There's a pattern of blaming technology and technologists for shitty or harmful work, while actively ignoring the business side that devised and commissioned it on purpose. Stop blaming LLMs. Start blaming entrepreneurs who chose how to deploy them.
- whatsThisBtn4 2mo agoNo one wants? I understand normies on Facebook saying that, but you are on HN. How do you keep that position with the evidence getting thrown at you daily?
- nancyminusone 2mo agoDo you use any of the AI features listed in the article, as shipped in the app? That's not the same thing as coding agents or cobbling together something for yourself.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoNobody wants = nobody on bluesky. I don't get this crusade mentality. The bigger problem with these apps is that they are proprietary and they have been spying on us.
- rad-b 2mo agoI’m not saying nobody wants to use AI, or AI coding and desktop apps. I’m using that daily as many others here are too. The article refers to different AI features within other apps (e.g. search overviews in google, summarize email, summarize message) that bring no benefit to the user but only clutter. I think everyone is fine with using their AI of choice to do their tasks of choice. It’s when I see a button that obstructs my workflow prompting me to do something I don’t need to with a shitty model that’s not good at it.
- BeetleB 2mo ago> Companies forcing features that nobody wants Literally every day that I browse HN I hear people complain about others' use of LLMs. How can you say "nobody wants" when it's used so much to elicit endless complaints?
- rad-b 2mo agoDo you use summarize email function in gmail or outlook? Do you use rewrite paragraphs feature in word or google docs? Do you know anyone who wants these features? That’s what I’m talking about, not AI use in general.
- bjackman 2mo agoWell this is why, as an enthusiastic AI user, even I usually want to disable intrusive AI! If it's popping up in some random product I don't pay for I can only assume it's such a shitty model that it's probably not worth talking to. (Exception: my bank has replaced its shitty phone tree with an AI chatbot. This is faster and the model has a "transfer to a human" tool. It's perfectly capable of following its playbook, determining that I need a human, and putting me in touch with one. So actually I started with "now I've gotta debase myself by talking to a fucking 32B Chinese LLM" but ended with "oh that was great actually").
- nemomarx 2mo agoAnyone know a good way to disable the ai summary on Google results? I know I should move over to kagi, but a ublock filter or something would still be nice.
- jdub 2mo agoAdd `udm=14` to the Google search query string... e.g. I changed my browser's default search engine shortcut.
- josefritzishere 2mo agoI have found that Element Hider and similar extensions will also block some of the worst features in the browser.
- IsTom 2mo agoFor single queries adding `-fuck` works.
- apazzolini 2mo ago`google.com##.hdzaWe` blocks the AI summary. This is better than udm=14 because it doesn't suppress the other sometimes-useful non-AI Google answer blocks.
- WolfeReader 2mo agoUse a different search engine such as Ecosia or noai.duckduckgo.com
- Jtarii 2mo agoThis is not an answer
- WolfeReader 2mo agoActually it is. I haven't seen any Google AI summaries since I started using non-Google search engines.
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- josefritzishere 2mo agoIt's a sad state of affairs when companies are cramming this unwanted garbage into every app putting the onus on the user to block, disable, unsubscribe, delete, edit and mitigate. Nobody asked for AI slop.
- whatsThisBtn4 2mo agoCurrently the best theory I have is that China bought a bunch of accounts from India to promote anti AI propaganda. The people not corrupted by this are loving AI. From concerns about AI taking jobs to people upvoting memes made by AI, it's getting obvious the slop is getting smaller. And anyone who knew how LLMs worked in 2023 were fine with the slop. It was only normies who didn't understand how it worked.
- noir_lord 2mo agoToday’s winner of Poe’s Law of the Day goes to your comment. Well done.
- dinkleberg 2mo agoI recently discovered that you need to have Siri enabled for Apple CarPlay. I expect we're going to see a lot of this where when you disable the AI functionality the devs won't have put in fallback states and you'll be effectively locked out. With CarPlay for instance there is no reason that I shouldn't be able to listen to my music or use the map without Siri. But things like responding to texts does rely on Siri, so just gate that piece. It is rather unfortunate.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jesterson 2mo agoThis got me mad too. And also restrictiveness of it - i can't see messages - WTH seriously? Why some tech stuff decides what is "safe"? (i guess it was the main driver)
- goalieca 2mo agoI was very upset about this. I had a rental car and I needed to enter on the map where I wanted to go. Even with a damn keyboard it wanted Siri. It’s just gps and i had to dig my phone out and do the typing there instead.
- klausa 2mo agoThis only happens (should happen?) when you're moving, when stationary there is a keyboard that appears; which feels like a reasonable safety precaution for me.
- jacquesm 2mo agoThat's why I'm all for appliances. Stuff should just shut up and have buttons all these arguments with hardware are getting very tiring.
- sublinear 2mo agoFallback states are generally a ton of work that don't benefit the direction that the PM or broader business would want to go anyway. It's a pet peeve of mine that we often say "devs" when we really mean "the business". It seems to be gamers who started this language. They'll even call the publisher "the devs".
- cryo32 2mo agoThe trick I use is to immediately go "fuck it I'm not using that product" I'm remarkably free of any intrusive AI.
- encom 2mo agoThis. Debian+KDE. No AI and nothing happens on my computer that I don't know about.
- mark_l_watson 2mo agoGood list! Removing as much as possible all AI and surveillance features, then carefully adding back the very few I want is the way I roll.
- Isamu 2mo agoSo the next iteration of surveillance features is to silently double down on users that turn off surveillance, because why would they do that unless they have something to hide? Better flag this user for extra super-secret surveillance and an immediate notification to authorities.
- mark_l_watson 2mo agoYou make a reasonable argument. I will take my chances and more people I talk with now seem more concerned about privacy.
- happosai 2mo agoUnfortunately doesn't tell me how make Rovo go away.
- stephantul 2mo agoMy heart bleeds for Rovo’s product managers. They must also see that nobody actually wants or needs or even likes Rovo.
- watwut 2mo agoThe cloud jira is such a downgrade overall. You cant have reasonable markdown or date format, but have AI "make longer" torture button. And deceiving "improve description" AI button which just ... makes it pointlessly longer.
- apercu 2mo agoIt's a dumpster fire now like everything else (Quickbooks... ugh, I'm migrating off at the end of my fiscal year).
- yabones 2mo agoUntil 2023 I ran our on-prem Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc etc. I had an ancient 6c/6t box with about 24G of memory, and a couple 10K drives & 500G SSDs. It was fast, responsive, rock solid, and LDAP had everybody's accounts synced perfectly. Then they strong-armed everybody but the largest enterprises onto their cloud. The alternative was painful (exporting/munging/importing to an alternative) so most of us went along for the ride. It took less than a year for them to start enshittifying their core product. Now it's basically unrecognizable from the product we used on-prem only three years ago. I'll always be salty that my box of spare parts was superior to their cloud service in nearly every way.
- lbrito 2mo agoThe Jira AI buttons? I block them with an adblocker
- latexr 2mo agoIt would be nice to have this accessible in a repo, so we could track changes and submit corrections/new sources.
- jessamyn 2mo agoIt's creative commons licensed, go nuts! (or send me updates and I'll do it)
- geekamongus 2mo agoOn Mac, you can use https://wairy.app https://wairy.app (full disclosure, I made this) to check what you have given AI perms to do on your computer (knowingly or not), then revoke them.
- pseudosaid 2mo agoits shareware and feature locked behind paywall.
- HDBaseT 2mo agoThis is unfortunately common among the Mac crowd.
- dceddia 2mo agoRecently bothered by the Amazon Alexa for Shopping thing that slides out constantly and can’t be turned off, I found this Chrome extension. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adios-alexa-for-shopping/mieclgnidoedjdjgbkdbdeeighicndkk https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adios-alexa-for-sho...
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jessamyn 2mo agoThank you, I've added this suggestion for Chrome/Firefox
- netsharc 2mo agoHah, the app to view the file format that simulates paper documents has AI now... (PDF/Adobe Reader).
- Loughla 2mo agoI use Adobe to send proofs of designs to clients and the AI toolbar has popped up every time for the last month or so. I have ZERO idea why anyone would want AI inside a program used to view documents. Do people use Adobe reader for things other than opening .pdf files?
- soupspaces 2mo agoSo, like closing intrusive popups before and blockers, then.
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoThanks for this. I love AI but I seriously hate the way these corporations keep forcing it into literally everything. I want to use AI on my own terms.
- astudentinearth 2mo agoMuch needed list. On the browser front, I recommend giving a try to alternatives like Zen or Helium, which are Firefox and Chromium based respectively. For AI buttons that specifically bug you, content blockers like uBlock Origin are especially helpful to zap them out of the page.
- jessamyn 2mo agoThank you, I've added these browser suggestions.
- jessamyn 2mo agoHello -- this is mine! There's a short URL: https://NoToAI.org https://NoToAI.org If people have suggestions I'll add them.
- devindotcom 2mo agofunny to see you here rather than mefi jessamyn. thanks for everything!
- evnp 2mo agoThanks for putting this together, incredible resource. Wanted to suggest &udm=14 added to Google search URLs to omit the AI overview and other frills. Personally, I use Chrome's search engine settings to add that param automatically when searching from the browser url bar. I also came across this: https://udm14.com/ https://udm14.com/
- kennywinker 2mo agoSwitch to linux, that's what I did. Literally. The endless waves of companies forcing LLMs down our throats and into our workflows drove me off the mac. And windows is worse, which leaves linux.
- jessamyn 2mo agoWhich Linux phone do you prefer?
- lpcvoid 2mo ago[dead]
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- Hackbraten 2mo agoThere are several. I’ve been daily driving one for three years.
- kennywinker 2mo agoCurrently auditioning a used pixel 8 with graphene os on it. It's nice. Not strictly linux, but it's de-googled. Minimal. Not designed to suck you in. Bit of a pain to get installed, but other than that, pretty good. My iPhone is the last tie i have to the apple ecosystem, so it's been much harder to untangle than my mac was - but I'm getting close! :)
- dredmorbius 2mo agoIf you want pure-play Linux, there's Purism (PureOS), Pine (PineOS), SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch (33 supported devices, including Fairphone, Xiaomi, Google Pixel, and Lenovo, amongst others), Tizen, Mobian (based on Debian), and postMarketOS (based on Alpine Linux). If you want an alternative to the iOS / Android duopoly, and will accept AOSP (Android Open Source Project) or de-Googled Android, there are AOSP devices (including KaiOS), GrapheneOS, LineageOS, /e/OS, LightOS (Light Phone), and a number of feature phone / dumbphone OSes including System30+ (S30+), OpenHarmony, and a few others, see Wikipedia's list: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system>. Practically, I'd suggest a feature-phone plus either a small laptop (far more capable than iOS/Android), or a tablet/phone running GrapheneOS or LineageOS, possibly one of the full-featured Linux OSes above. Google Pixel is ironically amongst the most viable non-Android hardware devices, with Fairphone and Purism being my next-strongest options. Apparently Lineage is now supporting Samsung's Galaxy series: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339930>, and GrapheneOS Motorola support has previously been announced, though remains pending: <https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at-mwc-2026/ https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at...>. I'm not sure which of these include bundled AI, though I suspect that that's going to be coming to more platforms, absent AI backlash which seems to be swelling presently.
- bookofjoe 2mo agoOh! The joy of driving a 2010 car with 60,000 miles on it knowing it's more likely than not I've never have to experience CarPlay/Siri/etc.
- Ekaros 2mo agoWorst my external navigator does is ask me to update maps some times. Rest of the time it stays away from my way...
- bookofjoe 2mo agoMaps? Don't got no damn maps!
- jessamyn 2mo agoI drive a 2009 car with 110K miles on it and a Garmin GPS which has never heard of the internet, I am right there with you.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoThe article missed a few obvious ones: LibreWolf and Waterfox rip out the AI features with prejudice. I don't know anyone who uses Zen or Helium (and haven't heard of the latter). If you have an iPhone 14 or older, you're safe from any AI features and have legacy Siri. LibreOffice instead of Office Linux instead of Windows (and I will not be entertaining "but end users won't do that" - because that is false. Linux market share is growing year over year) Codeberg instead of GitHub VSCodium instead of VSCode
- jessamyn 2mo agoThanks for suggesting more mainstream alt-browsers. This article isn't about avoiding all AI everywhere so much as it is for people who want to turn the intrusive AI off in the things they are already using. There are even more things that could be in this including Windows registry editing, Linux, and all the great FOSS options but it's mostly not for that. I do have an older iPhone and I agree, it's sort of great to have legacy Siri.
- thih9 2mo ago> go to System Settings – Apple Intelligence & Siri. Select About Siri, Dictation & Privacy… near the end of the page, turn off apps you don’t want Siri to learn from This is very user unfriendly.
- qqt 2mo ago[flagged]
- high_5 2mo agoThis reminds me of the ole days of cleaning up preinstalled Windows of bloatware. Some clean Linux distro on desktop is the only path open to human-first tech.
- dartharva 2mo agoZoom might just be the only app in which AI actually has added value for me. For almost everything else, universally, it is an unwanted bloat at best.
- trevortaylorai 2mo ago[flagged]