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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
`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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"?
Is this maybe dependent on country? I have used carplay, and don't have siri enabled.
I used CarPlay yesterday with Siri disabled. Am I missing something?
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.
On our car I can hook up my iPhone via Bluetooth to listen to audio books and music, bypassing carplay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
Hello -- this is mine! There's a short URL: https://NoToAI.org If people have suggestions I'll add them.
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.
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
Unfortunately doesn't tell me how make Rovo go away.
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).
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.
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.
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
Use a different search engine such as Ecosia or noai.duckduckgo.com
I have found that Element Hider and similar extensions will also block some of the worst features in the browser.
Hah, the app to view the file format that simulates paper documents has AI now... (PDF/Adobe Reader).
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.
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.
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.
It would be nice to have this accessible in a repo, so we could track changes and submit corrections/new sources.
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.