The next premium feature in technology could be the absence of AI

You must remember that video meme by Sundar Pichai, where he can be heard repeatedly saying the word AI for what seemed like a full minute. It was a clip from their Google I/O presentation, which was about AI, and that is also, in fact, the state of Google right now. The company is trying to bring AI to every corner of its consumer products, be it Android or Chrome. Even its flagship product, Search, is slated to become AI-first, as if it isn’t already heavily promoting AI search results.

When Google is so adamant about pushing AI through Search, it’s ironic that suggested a user to use DuckDuckGo if they wanted an experience without AI. With an abundance of AI literally everywhere, people have already started looking for online experiences that are not marked by AI for the sake of it. I think that will become the selling point of digital services, much like what was once an ad-free experience.

I want to see the weather and I get an AI-generated summary. I select text on my Mac and Apple Intelligence eagerly awaits me in the context menu. In Google Docs, there’s Gemini trying to get my attention to summarize a long PDF. I try to update my reading list, but first I have to encounter a Notion AI popup. I search for a website on Google Search and I have to scroll first an AI-generated summary block.

However, these AI features are imposed on us and are often enabled by default without first obtaining our consent.

As AI becomes integrated into everything internet-related, a new category of products is emerging that specifically caters to users who want less AI.

While that might have been true a couple of years ago, when you had to go to a separate app like ChatGPT to interact with AI, with AI being integrated across the board and even taking priority over existing flows, it’s become hard to ignore.

I don’t consider myself an AI pessimist. I believe that AI and advanced agents take over many of our mundane workflows not too far in the future. That being said, I still believe that the choice to use these features should rest with the end users, and a simple way to achieve this is to toggle. And many companies have already started making AI optional rather than imposing it on users.

DuckDuckGo, the browser and search engine that Google Search itself directed users to, leaves it up to you to decide whether you want to use AI features or not. You can leave them disabled and have an experience exactly as before. While DuckDuckGo entered the conversation after Google retired, Mozilla Firefox is another privacy-focused web browser that has been in the works. offer AI in a more restricted way. It has some useful features like smart tab grouping and translation that we’ve been seeing in other AI-native browsers, but the difference here is that these features prioritize privacy, as you’d expect from Mozilla, and are optional.

Obsidian is a popular alternative to Notion that’s offline first. And that difference has continued in AI as well. Unlike Notion AI, Obsidian has not included AI features directly into its app without user consent. Instead, it allows you, whatever type of AI functionality you need, for example, talking to your notes or anything else using add-on plugins. The experience remains clean for most users, while those who really need AI features can easily add them to their app.

Most famously, Apple Intelligence was implemented as a switch within the phone’s settings that needed to be turned on in order for the iPhone to run the new version of Siri and download all the local models needed for tasks like generating text and images. Even Proton, known for its strong privacy-first stance, has launched an AI chatbot, Lumo, that maintains equally strict privacy standards. Even where the AI ​​is Integrated into Proton services.you are not granted access to your data by default; For example, you need to copy and paste your emails into the chatbot if you want it to help you write an email.

In the past, our TVs, connected devices, and online services were plagued with online ads and pop-ups everywhere, to the point where you had to click a thousand times to dismiss ads and pop-ups just to get to the content you clicked on in the first place. It reached a point of discomfort where a counter-narrative emerged in the form of subscriptions that lured you in with their ad-free experience. Both Netflix and YouTube Premium grew about this fundamental concept of offering distraction-free media if you were willing to spend a small fee instead of watching tons of ads on the free tier.

This anti-narrative has existed throughout the history of technology. As Google and other companies increasingly encroached on privacy and began creating detailed profiles of you, to the point where they knew more about you than you know yourself, products like Proton and Firefox emerged as privacy-focused alternatives.

When smartphones started to become overwhelming, with hundreds of apps trying to grab your attention, minimalist phones It attracted a small (but determined) number of people who wanted to get rid of distractions.

And there’s no denying that AI is following the same path as it makes its way into every piece of technology you can touch with your fingers. A contrary stance is emerging in the form of a premium experience without AI.

AI is not going anywhere; is here to stay. In fact, you’ll see a lot more, not less.

However, that will still leave room for a narrative that is the opposite of the default, and that won’t be zero AI. Instead, users will have the option to enable AI features if they actually add them to their workflows, or leave them disabled if they turn out to be nothing more than bloatware. While that’s already happening with some of the products we just looked at, there’s likely another layer of user control where people can choose exactly how much AI they need.

As a writer, I don’t want AI to do the actual writing work, so I don’t want it in my drawing tools. However, I still increasingly rely on AI natural language processing to find a small idiom or obscure phrase that I vaguely remember from somewhere, that is not possible to locate in traditional dictionaries. And so it will be for many users who will be able to choose where and how much AI they want to allow in their lives.

If Google Search is too much AI for you, Google itself provided an alternative on DuckDuckGo. And that phrase alone sums up where the market is headed right now. There is room for a parallel world of products without AI, leaving users to decide when and where they want AI. And that’s exactly how it should be.