How to disable or avoid intrusive AI | Hacker News Reader

How to disable or avoid intrusive AI

librarian.net

340 pointsColinWright198 comments

I 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.

I had a similar experience when I tried to search through reviews on amazon on the mobile website.

The search box is gone and you're supposed to ask Rufus now.

  > you're supposed to ask Rufus now

completely off-topic but the names they give these dumb ai tools is so cringe

What would you call it?

Useless. I would call it useless.

Dufus is how it automatically maps when I say it out loud.

You know what the solution is, don't you? You need to stop using your phone for things. At least as much as you can. Apple or Google are going to build the device that makes sense for them. If you get comfortable, or find a workaround, they will change things in the future -- in their favor, and against your interests.

You have other options right now: use an aux cable, play music over bluetooth, listen to the radio, purchase $30 MP3 player, pay attention to your thoughts rather than music, etc.

Spotify on CarPlay is absolutely miserable because of this.

No search, no album or artist pages, only “ask Siri”. I’m not even mad that there’s no keyboard, I will happily use voice dictation instead. Instead, what you get is essentially an “I’m feeling lucky” button that fails unless you want to listen to a specific playlist.

I agree it works terrible. If I say "I want hear album X from artist Y" it replies with "Here is 'This is Y' playlist", or worse "This is Z by D". This is especially annoying if I drive with someone who requests music. Eventually, I always end up pulling up my phone at the stopping lights. Kind of makes me miss the Old Ways (CD player, or AUX in).

I 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.

This 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.

That's why I'm all for appliances. Stuff should just shut up and have buttons all these arguments with hardware are getting very tiring.

Yes, the "okay if you want to disable AI, we're going to remove non-AI features" paradigm that Gmail is also doing.

I used CarPlay yesterday with Siri disabled. Am I missing something?

I don't understand why anyone likes CarPlay. It has always seemed like people like it because it's better than nothing. It's just not a good system in an objective sense.

CarPlay and Android Auto aren't popular because they're good, per se. They're popular because they're good enough compared to the status quo ante, which was a sea of craptastic infotainment systems.

What does “not a good system in an objective sense” even mean? In what objective measures do you see it fail in?

I and basically everyone I know love it because it and android auto are made by actual UI/UX designers that aren’t embedded systems engineers- resulting in an infotainment screen that isn’t a complete and utter piece of shit, and has actual functionality. I use my phone for everything in my car anyways, especially navigation, which historically is not included in a cars infotainment system without subscription and/or vendor lock. In that one singular regard, CarPlay is literally infinity percent better than every single built in infotainment system, because I can use my fucking cars built in screen instead of my tiny phone display to navigate using software that is infinitely more well made than whatever shit is on my cars native system (a brief note: my angry tone is not directed at you or your lack of agreement with my opinion, but at how awful I perceived the car infotainment systems of yore to be. God they were useless.)

For every objective measure I can come up with in my head and not type out, it passes with flying colors compared to the alternative- so I’d love to know where your perception differs.

My old car was a Toyota Rav4 2001 and my only usage of the infotainment system was to play music and get directions from google map (voice via bluetooth). I think the only controls I used on the head unit was the volume knob and the call button (to receive a call). I've never needed anything else.

This is not a counterpoint to your argument. It's more a context about the following question: Is the infotainment on a car actually useful?

No. The ideal infotainment "system" should be a volume knob, the minimum interface to get a secure connection, and a good modular tilt-and-swivel holder for a phone with obvious cable routing for a power cable and optional wireless charging.

Vehicles should be designed to last ten years so that the resale market can support the ridiculous prices for new. The infotainment system is the only part that is subject to external technological compatibility issues over that timespan.

Carplay is sort of interesting because the UI does generally suck less than the UI of most infotainment systems. But it is much worse than my phone UI. Various apps seem to be missing their search abilities entirely.

It isn’t as bad as most built-in over developed systems, but it has not quite reached the perfection of a cheap phone mount and a car that is dumb enough to act as a Bluetooth speaker.

See how defensive people get about CarPlay? Why so emotionally invested? It's buggy and sucks when you are driving someone else's car or a rental. You proved my point too, which is that it's liked because it's better than everything else, not because it's objectively good.

“I don’t understand why people love it so much” and “the system has friction that could be improved” are two extremely different statements with vastly different communications.

While it may be constructive to point out and discuss that, hey CarPlay has deficiencies and really could stand to be improved in XYZ way, vaguely gesturing at CarPlay and saying “I don’t get why people love this so much” and tacitly implying they’re wrong or stupid for doing so, is just unhelpful.

If you’d have started the whole conversation with “I get why people appreciate the improvement, but CarPlay still sucks because it doesn’t work well in vehicles you don’t own”, we’d be having an entirely different conversation right now, actually discussing and commiserating the downsides and technical limitations that Apple should definitely fix.

But alas, the message implied by “why do people like this if it’s objectively bad”, is that said people are stupid- not that we should do it. And “objectively bad” is also super broad, and dismissive of the all of the things that a lot of people probably consider objectively good, like the decoupling of updates from auto manufacturers, and some of the UI/UX behavior hereto undescribed.

I wasn’t so much fervently defending “my baby” as I was: explaining “why people love it so much”, which was the question asked; bitching about the systems of yesteryear because they sucked ass more notably than CarPlay does, at least imo; and objecting to the premise of your discussion hook for being vague and (very mildly) inflammatory.

Your response is also inflammatory. Id have loved to complain about the downsides of CarPlay and where it fails, but you basically just called me a whiny fanboy for, at the core of my response, objecting to a contentless question.

He's basically _wrong_ about it being bad in cars you don't own, too.

It could definitely be better; but given a choice of figuring out how to pair AA/CP in a rental car, or working with the built-in nav (which has no idea about my schedule, locations, etc)... I _always_ select pairing AA/CP.

It's so bad I don't pair it at all and crank the volume all the way up and hope for the best.

See how snide and condescending anti-Apple people get whenever somebody likes an Apple product? Why so emotionally invested? You're a weird techie who just wants to look down on people who like a product that you don't.

You proved my point too, in that you were unnecessarily shitty about your difference of opinion, because you're objectively a weird fucking asshole.

I don't care that it's Apple?

Is this maybe dependent on country? I have used carplay, and don't have siri enabled.

I'm not excited for iOS 27. I tried out the beta and decided to reset my phone to get my back to iOS 26. I find the new Siri is far worse and slower to respond, if that's even possible. It also adds new features that are hard to remove. I only use it for timers and playing music and the current Siri is just fine for that imo.

i feel relatively comfortable with carply + basic siri, leaving apple intelligence off. basic siri is pretty limited in scope of what it has access to and what it can do.

while it's an arbitrary line ive drawn, basic siri doesn't feel like "ai" in the same sense as context-aware assistants do for me.

I’ve never once been able to use CarPlay because I objected to Siri uploading information about my contacts list unencrypted to Apple’s servers.

it's a bit more nuanced than you are making it out to be, but that's absolutely a fine and understandable choice to make.

With Apple intelligence turned on, when I take a screenshot on my iPhone, it wants me to do this search that goes to temu, instead of the text selection that it used to do. So I turned it off, but I have to turn it back on to have auto translation in iMessage.

yes! i just did this today as well. the product direction at apple is completely messed up imo

Apple considers siri essential for CarPlay and I don’t really disagree. Don’t forget that a big part of the design of CarPlay tries to explicitly discourage tactile use while driving, with siri as the alternative input/output method.

I start my music and navigation route before leaving my garage, and any other interactions (volume up/down, skip song) are buttons on my steering wheel. What do I need voice input for?

(I use Android Auto, but it's basically the same thing for these purposes)

Do people really use navigation apps often enough for this to be an issue?

Yes, it's one of the most common usages of a phone in the car. And most people I know have exactly that workflow: find and set a navigation destination while parked, then drive there without interacting with the phone.

Are you asking if people use apps to get directions? I don’t have data to back this up, but I’d guess that nav integration is one of the most popular features of CarPlay and Android Auto.

I depend on it for road trips, navigating to unfamiliar destinations, or even just sharing ETAs with people

I'm not sure I've seen anyone drive further than about 10 minutes away without Google Maps in the last 5 years.

Or maybe everyone's misunderstanding your question?

I don't really understand why anyone would need sat nav for a ten minute drive.

Neither, but my coworkers are apparently unable to carpool to a lunch spot 5 mins away that we visit every 2-3 weeks without setting nav first.

Many years ago now I picked up a colleague (the boss's son, actually) to drive down to London from Glasgow to collect some equipment.

First thing he did was slap a massive TomTom sat nav in the middle of the screen. He got pretty indignant when I told him to take it off, because it was blocking my view out the windscreen.

"But how will you know where to go?"

Dude, it's London. London is south. We go south. We go south for like eight hours.

We can use the sat nav for the last dozen or so of the 400-odd miles we'll be driving.

Maybe he didn’t know that you knew how to get onto the motorway, or that it’s straightforward to do so. Try driving I-80 in San Francisco during rush hour and make the 4th Street exit without getting forced onto the Bay Bridge, without either having done it before or without some sort of guidance- digital or otherwise. Getting on and off a freeway is not always simple.

Not to mention, even long road trips sometimes require a few highway transitions.

Once the city you live in gets large enough, memorizing the routes just becomes a non starter. I have my route to work almost memorized but due to construction or crashes it changes so often it is hard to cement it. (Seoul)

Because the traffic isn't known to you but it is to Google. I could take two routes, one is faster depending on circumstances, and Google knows those circumstances.

Is it really faster though?

All you have now is two routes with a roughly equal amount of traffic on.

One of those routes will be a massive detour.

How do you know those routes have a roughly equal amounts of traffic? Or that there’s only two routes? I usually see at least three possible routes with my commute (with some forking), and at least one shortcut. During heavy traffic one optimized route can at least save 10-15 minutes than the slower one(s).

It's really unlikely that you're saving any time at all.

This just isn't true. You're assuming the conclusion and saying the routes will have equal amounts of traffic and that one will be way longer and that it's unlikely you're saving time. Except people that have experience with Google Maps have watched it flag upcoming traffic congestion and explicitly reroute you and ask you to confirm and show the time difference. That's the real-time aspect, but it can also project forward in time and estimate what the traffic along routes will be at the time you want to travel, so it's also an important planning tool.

I have no idea why it's contentious that having nationwide surveillance of traffic patterns would result in better routing decisions.

And you know this how

Unfortunately, accidents are quasi commonplace among my commute.

I’m perplexed too, but I used to study the Hudson’s map book for my metro area for fun before I could drive and have been driving for 25 years, and I didn’t have a phone with GPS until 2015 or so.

I don’t use active navigation, if I don’t know hot go get where I am going I just memorize the portion of the route I don’t know and then drive there. I will occasionally see what route is recommended due to road construction, but I generally know all of the proposed routes so I don’t need GPS once I pick one.

I avoid using active GPS navigation so my mental map of the road network stays in my brain, I think orientation/navigation is an important skill to maintain and using active turn-by-turn GPS destroys it.

Yes, of course. In my case Waze to get there efficiently, OSMand App for topographic maps, and occasionally Apple Maps (works well with addresses in Calendar) and Sygic. I use them in the car, and on my bike: ruggedised CarPlay / Android Auto screens are rapidly displacing ruggedised satnavs on bikes. Playing audiobooks and podcasts is handy, as is getting text messages read out with dictation for reply, but it's navigation which is the killer app for ACP/AA.

I use navigation apps on any trip where there's a possibility of traffic, because they'll route me around it.

I use navigation via Google Maps/Android Auto almost every time I drive anywhere, easily north of 95% of the time.

Why? Are you driving somewhere completely unfamiliar where you have no mental model of how to get there every time?

I just kind of don't get why people are so into it.

A bunch of reasons, in no particular order: Having my phone visibly in-use makes it easier to avoid the temptation of touching it. I have a long history of playing video games, and seeing a "mini-map" is just how I'm used to navigating, even when I know the way. Having navigation that incorporates real-time conditions helps me avoid construction, traffic jams, or other miscellaneous issues. I have a pretty bad sense of direction, and it takes multiple trips to internalize routes, which doesn't happen because I drive infrequently (typically less than weekly, because I prefer to take the bus).

I guess it didn't occur to me that people might not remember how to get places in real life.

I don't think I could stand to have any sort of lit-up screen doing something in my eyeline when I'm driving. I turn off the backlight on the dashboard when I'm driving at night because it annoys me.

Again, it's also helpful for warning realtime issues like poor traffic conditions, road obstacles, speed traps, etc.

I don't know why people don't seem to understand what I mean when I say "I don't want any kind of lit-up screen in my field of view for any reason".

Why would I care about speed traps or road obstacles? "Poor traffic conditions" isn't really something I can do much about, either.

The response is to “it didn't occur to me that people might not remember how to get places in real life”, which is a rather limited understanding of why people might use navigation. I am not here to preach to you the benefits of this technology, simply clarifying an additional use case. There’s no need to conflate your own needs or tastes with the rest of the driving populace, either.

Also, those notifications can likely be conveyed using audio-only warnings, anyway. Making all of this discussion a bit moot.

Finally the entire benefit of live navigation is to find alternate routes with less traffic! That is something you could literally do about.

Most of the places I drive, there aren't really any practical alternative routes that don't add several hours and often things like a ferry journey to your trip.

I don't want audio alerts for anything either. It's really simple - I don't want anything in the car that beeps, flashes, lights up, makes noise, or indeed does anything that is not directly part of making the car go in the required direction at the required speed.

I don't understand the mental process that leads to the pattern

"I don't understand why other people would do X"

"Well, it can be because of Y, Z, or W."

"But I don't do/need/want any of those"

"..."

It's like it's a fundamental failure to understand that other minds are separate from yours and have different motives and preferences.

Okay, that’s fine for yourself, but as seen in this subthread, other people have different tastes, and needs.

You've jumped from "I don't understand why anybody would do this" to "I don't want it".

People are different. People have different use cases. People live in different areas.

Because my 15 minute drive can be a 60 minute drive depending on traffic and there are 3 viable routes I could take.

Traffic changes while I'm driving and it automatically updates. An accident can occur on a bridge I'm approaching and I can get detoured and save actual time that I can spend with loved ones instead.

If I'm driving later at night, construction may block off my normal route and I can still get wherever I'm going.

I also get notifications for hazards like objects on the road, disabled vehicles, or events that are going to cause traffic. (I use Waze)

And the cost is zero. When I get into my car it automatically syncs and off I go. There's no reason to NOT have it.

The cost isnt zero, previously you were exercising your brain and spatial awareness, you've now offloaded that critical thinking. Repeat this often enough in all areas of your life and you'll start to see impacts down the line on brain and memory function.

Taxi/ambulance drivers who are required to memorise large parts of their city have the lowest dementia risk out of all (studied) professions.

This is about optimizing a commute with realtime info. There are other cognitive training methods beyond being Jamie Foxx in Collateral.

Every day. Not for knowing how to get to a destination necessarily, but to get routed better.

Hard disagree. Checking the accelerometer to disable tactile functionality when moving would have been a more intelligent way to go about discouraging this behavior over mandating use of a historically unpopular technology (Siri) in order to use a popular one (Maps, Bluetooth music streaming).

This reeks of the metrics-gaming desperation that we've seen in Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as well.

Shoehorn unpopular technology to gatekeep popular technology. Either way the consumer's quality of life goes down.

Interestingly, I have Google Assistant more or less disabled on my Android phone, but it still works when I have Android Auto enabled (which is fine by me since that's the one time that I ever want to use it).

I got the email that they're burying Assistant in September...

I use it on the phone to set alarms, add tasks or calendar events, I swipe up on the home screen to launch the app, and talk. For calendar, speech ("add calendar event dentist appointment on September 22 at 4pm") is even much more convenient than scrolling to the right month/date, using the UI to pick the time.

I'm currently vibe-coding a replacement app to use on-device speech recognition and setting alarms or adding calendar events. Sadly third party apps can't add stuff to Google Tasks without further interaction (or without OAuth) like Assistant/Gemini can.

Moreover, you cannot turn off Auto, as it will forcefully turn on WiFi even if you explicitly disable it.

And Google considers necessary to report (using tactile use while driving) if there are blockages in the road, construction, lane closures, an accident, etc.

The discrepancy of using both with an iphone is disconcerting.

Would be interesting to see anti competition law applied here, too. Essentially bundling the two together, leveraging the market for car play to gain adoption for Siri.

Is every utilization of CarPlay inside a car performed "while driving"?

On our car I can hook up my iPhone via Bluetooth to listen to audio books and music, bypassing carplay.

This 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)

Fallback 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".

A developer made whatever tech is currently pissing me off. I don't care about the supply chain.

How do you feel about other hot button issues like LLMs, privacy policies, Flock cameras, etc.? By your reasoning, developers "make" those things too.

My point is just to make sure we're pointing the blame at the business where it belongs. It seems very strange how we generally do that, but make exceptions for features. Developers don't control features either. Always blame the business.

This language around "devs" is so twisted and inconsistent that I'm convinced someone is seeding this every time to deflect blame. i.e. "oops just a slip up by the devs" as if features could ever be anything but a massive premeditated effort involving dozens if not hundreds of people planning at least several months ahead of any code being written.

If you want to make a difference, you look at who is running the business. It means what a lot of fanboys cannot admit to themselves. Their favorite companies and CEOs might just be assholes.

I don't want to Godwin this thread so early, but you know what analogy I'm thinking of. If you work as a developer for Google, Microsoft, Flock, CloudFlare, Facebook etc. etc. you are complicit in making the world a crappier place.

Did J. Random Hacker at Google decide to ruin Android app development[1] for everyone? No, but he made it happen. I hate that guy. (Also.)

[1] Edit: I'm referring to this nonsense: https://keepandroidopen.org/

You choose to have that perspective and be subject to that locus of control.

Where do you really draw the line? How do you feel about money? How do you feel about eating to stay alive?

Ultimately, this is not a philosophy debate. If you're confused about what work is, that's your own problem. The business is still to blame.

I'm not saying it isn't, but I don't have a shred of sympathy for the developers manning the ovens. Pick a job that isn't actively harmful to society.

If you're responsible for the system at Facebook that serves endless brainrot to people, starvation is too good for you.

I think you attribute way too much to the developers. Corporate offices are not small.

Didn't we run this playbook and find just following orders isn't an excuse?

Such 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.

Nobody 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.

I suspect it's also a defensive move.

Imagine you make a widely hated product targeted at huge corporations. Workday, Jira, Oracle Financials, anything like that.

Then you find that all your users are using ChatGPT to automate their interactions with your product. Instead of your product being crucial to your customers' business and almost impossible to replace, it's turning into a dumb pipe connecting LLMs - and looking very much threatened.

After all, data lock-in is a core part of your business strategy.

Getting people to use your AI tool, though? That makes your product stickier, and lets you charge more too.

  > That makes your product stickier, and lets you charge more too.

not for jira, that things ai is garbage and gets in the way most of the time (and same for a lot of companies imo)

Thing 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.

> 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.

> engagement" (with no concrete plans to monetize said engagement)

Google and Meta have made billions monetizing said engagement

Eh, 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.

Woe betide the company cursed with smart investors

> 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?

Do 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.

we’ve reached the stage of market consolidation where corporations dictate consumer behavior, not vice versa

We'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.

Been 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.

I 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"

Nobody, 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.

You can't say that. Also that isn't happening.

Are you their dad?

> 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.

Choosing 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.

Well 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").

Many 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.

How many people prefer having an AI gate customer support, for instance? I don't think we are talking about two groups here.

I'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.

How about if AI was the gate for emergency services dispatch?

I 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.

  > 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

Alternative 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).

Shitty 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.

Don'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.

Gee, I wonder if HN became this way because of AI shaking the ground they walked on after years of dedication and study? And on top of that, doing a shit job of everything it touches, causing massive paranoia in every corner of the internet, that place we all live now? Gosh I wonder why!?!?

The pro-ai posts here have got to be 50% bots, i'm convinced. I have yet to see a single artefact of AI that was remotely impressive. Fancy markov chains do not intelligence make.

No 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?

Do 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.

Nobody 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.

I’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.

This whole "nobody wants" narrative is getting tiresome. It is provably false, and is just a rhetorical tool.

Prove 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.

> 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).

That'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.

I want them, which violates the Universal qualifier on your statement. Discrete math for the win.

Switch 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.

Which Linux phone do you prefer?

If 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>.

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>, and GrapheneOS Motorola support has previously been announced, though remains pending: <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.

And which of those lets you access you bank, or use Government ID?

I’ve never had an issue accessing necessary services from Linux. Once, literally, I had to use a Chromium browser — but presumably that would have been the case off Linux, as well.

What services are you thinking of that gate at an OS level?

All match or exceed my present capabilities.

What specific functionalities and/or apps are not supported in your experience?

Currently 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! :)

There are several. I’ve been daily driving one for three years.

The 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

Thanks 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.

Hello -- this is mine! There's a short URL: https://NoToAI.org If people have suggestions I'll add them.

Thanks 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/

funny to see you here rather than mefi jessamyn. thanks for everything!

Oh! 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.

I 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.

Worst my external navigator does is ask me to update maps some times. Rest of the time it stays away from my way...

Maps? Don't got no damn maps!

Recently 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-sho...

Thank you, I've added this suggestion for Chrome/Firefox

> 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.

Unfortunately doesn't tell me how make Rovo go away.

The Jira AI buttons? I block them with an adblocker

My heart bleeds for Rovo’s product managers. They must also see that nobody actually wants or needs or even likes Rovo.

The 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.

Until 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.

It's a dumpster fire now like everything else (Quickbooks... ugh, I'm migrating off at the end of my fiscal year).

Good 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.

So 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.

You make a reasonable argument. I will take my chances and more people I talk with now seem more concerned about privacy.

Much 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.

Thank you, I've added these browser suggestions.

On Mac, you can use 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.

its shareware and feature locked behind paywall.

This is unfortunately common among the Mac crowd.

This 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.

It would be nice to have this accessible in a repo, so we could track changes and submit corrections/new sources.

It's creative commons licensed, go nuts! (or send me updates and I'll do it)

The trick I use is to immediately go "fuck it I'm not using that product"

I'm remarkably free of any intrusive AI.

This. Debian+KDE. No AI and nothing happens on my computer that I don't know about.

Zoom 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.

Anyone 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.

Add `udm=14` to the Google search query string... e.g. I changed my browser's default search engine shortcut.

`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.

For single queries adding `-fuck` works.

I have found that Element Hider and similar extensions will also block some of the worst features in the browser.

Switched to Qwant because of that .. (corporate laptop does not allow changing the search engine urls, only changing the engine itself)

Honestly ? Not a stressy move, the major things that changes is that the IA bullshit is gone

adding easylist - annoyances (specifically the 'ai widgets' section) to your ublock filter lists should get rid of it! it doesn't catch it 100% of the time (the AI summary escapes when there's links above it in search results), but it gets rid of it most of the time.

Use a different search engine such as Ecosia or noai.duckduckgo.com

This is not an answer

Actually it is. I haven't seen any Google AI summaries since I started using non-Google search engines.

Hah, the app to view the file format that simulates paper documents has AI now... (PDF/Adobe Reader).

I 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?

It'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.

Currently 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.

Today’s winner of Poe’s Law of the Day goes to your comment.

Well done.

Thanks 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.

So, like closing intrusive popups before and blockers, then.

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