The topic The next premium feature in tech might be the absence of AI is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
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You must remember that meme video of Sundar Pichai where he can be heard repeatedly uttering the word AI for what felt like a full minute. It was a clip stitched together from his Google I/O presentation, which was all about AI, and that is indeed the state of Google right now, too. The company is trying to bring AI to every nook and cranny of its consumer products, be it Android or Chrome. Even its marquee product, Search, is slated to become AI-first, as if it’s already not heavily promoting AI search results.
When Google is so adamant about pushing AI through Search, it’s sort of ironic that it suggested a user go with DuckDuckGo if they wanted an AI-free experience. With an abundance of AI literally everywhere you look, people have already started looking for online experiences that aren’t marked by AI just for the sake of it. I think that will become the selling point for digital services, much like an ad-free experience once was.
I want to look at the weather, and I get an AI-generated summary. I select text on my Mac, and there is Apple Intelligence eagerly waiting for me in the context menu. In Google Docs, there is Gemini trying to grab my attention to summarize a long PDF. I try to update my reading list, but I first have to bump into a Notion AI pop-up. I look up a website on Google Search and have to first scroll past a slab of AI-generated summary.
Yet these AI features are shoved down our throats, often being enabled by default without first taking our consent.
As AI integrates into everything that touches the internet, a new category of products is emerging that specifically caters to users who want less AI.
While that could 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 integration happening across the board and even being given priority over existing flows, it has become difficult to ignore.
I don’t count myself as an AI pessimist. I reckon that advanced AI and agents will take over many of our mundane workflows not far off in future. Having said that, I still believe that the choice to use these features should rest with the end users — and a simple way to achieve that is a toggle. And a lot of companies have already started to make AI optional instead of forcing it on the users.
DuckDuckGo, the browser and search engine that Google Search itself pointed users to, leaves it up to you whether to use AI features or not. You can leave them turned off and have an experience that is exactly like before. While DuckDuckGo got into the conversation after Google’s pension, Mozilla Firefox is another privacy-focused web browser that has been working on offering AI in a more restrained manner. It has some handy features like smart tab grouping and translation that we have been seeing on other AI-native browsers, but the difference here is that these features are privacy-first, as you would expect from Mozilla, and are opt-in.
Obsidian is a popular Notion alternative that is offline-first. And that difference has continued to AI as well. Unlike Notion AI, Obsidian hasn’t included AI features directly in its app without user consent. It instead lets you, whatever kind of AI functionality you need, say to talk to your notes or something else using add-on plugins. The experience remains clean for most users, while those who actually need AI features can easily add it to their app.
More famously, Apple Intelligence rolled out as a toggle within the phone settings that you needed to turn on for the iPhone to run the new version of Siri and download all the necessary local models required for tasks like text and image generation. Even Proton, which is known for its strong privacy-first stance, has launched an AI chatbot, Lumo, that maintains similarly strict privacy standards. Even where AI is integrated into Proton’s services, it isn’t granted access to your data by default — for example, you have to copy and paste your emails into the chatbot if you want it to help write an email.
Back in the day, our TVs, connected devices, and online services were riddled with inline and pop-up ads everywhere, so much so that you had to click a thousand times to dismiss ads and pop-ups just to reach the content you clicked for in the first place. It reached a point of discomfort where a counter-narrative surfaced in the form of subscriptions that drew you in with their ad-free experience. Both Netflix and YouTube Premium grew on 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 tech. When Google and other companies became increasingly privacy-invasive and started creating detailed profiles of you, so much so that they knew more about you than you did about yourself, products like Proton and Firefox emerged as privacy-focused alternatives.
When smartphones started becoming overwhelming, with hundreds of apps trying to grab your attention, minimalist phones drew a small (but resolute) 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 tech you can touch with your fingers. A contrary stance is emerging in the form of a premium, AI-free experience.
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AI isn’t going anywhere; it’s here to stay. In fact, you’re actually going to see a lot more of it, not less.
However, that will still leave room for a narrative that runs opposite to the default, and that isn’t going to be zero AI. Instead, users will have the option to turn on AI features if they actually add to their workflows, or leave them switched off if they’re proving to be nothing more than bloatware. While that is already happening with some of the products we just discussed, there is likely to be another layer of user control where people can choose exactly how much AI they need.
As a writer, I don’t want AI to take over the job of actual writing, so I don’t want it in my drafting tools. However, I still increasingly rely on AI’s natural language processing to find an obscure little idiom or phrase that I vaguely remember from somewhere, which isn’t possible to locate in traditional dictionaries. And that’s how it’s going to be for a lot of users who will get to pick and choose where and how much AI they want to allow into their lives.
If Google Search is too much AI for you, it itself gave you an alternative in DuckDuckGo. And that sentence alone encapsulates where the market is headed right now. There’s room for a parallel world of AI-free products, leaving it up to users to decide when and where they want AI. And that’s exactly how it should be.
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