Google, Microsoft and Meta are shoving A.I. chatbots into our faces. Sometimes, there’s a way out.
Big tech brands like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Meta have all unleashed tech that they describe as artificial intelligence. Soon, the companies say, we’ll all be using A.I. to write emails, generate images and summarize articles.
But who asked for any of this in the first place?
Judging from the feedback I get from readers of this column, lots of people outside the tech industry remain uninterested in A.I — and are increasingly frustrated with how difficult it has become to ignore. The companies rely on user activity to train and improve their A.I. systems, so they are testing this tech inside products we use every day.
Typing a question such as “Is Jay-Z left-handed?” in Google will produce an A.I.-generated summary of the answer on top of the search results. And whenever you use the search tool inside Instagram, you may now be interacting with Meta’s chatbot, Meta AI. In addition, when Apple’s suite of A.I. tools, Apple Intelligence, arrives on iPhones and other Apple products through software updates this month, the tech will appear inside the buttons we use to edit text and photos.
The proliferation of A.I. in consumer technology has significant implications for our data privacy, because companies are interested in stitching together and analyzing our digital activities, including details inside our photos, messages and web searches, to improve A.I. systems. For users, the tools can simply be an annoyance when they don’t work well.
“There’s a genuine distrust in this stuff, but other than that, it’s a design problem,” said Thorin Klosowski, a privacy and security analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, and a former editor at Wirecutter, the reviews site owned by The New York Times. “It’s just ugly and in the way.”
It helps to know how to opt out. After I contacted Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google, they offered steps to turn off their A.I. tools or data collection, where possible. I’ll walk you through the steps.