How to Remove AI from Your Life: A Practical Guide

As more people grow anxious or frustrated with generative AI, a slightly countercultural question has emerged: how do you minimize AI's presence in your everyday life? Vox recently put together some genuinely actionable suggestions on this front — and in doing so, reflected a subtle but real shift in how the public feels about AI.

Public Trust in AI Is Declining

According to a recent survey cited by Vox, the number of Americans who distrust AI is twice that of those who trust it. Behind that figure lies a growing pile of concerns: AI systems have been caught hiding information or acting on their own initiative without permission, and whenever AI stops following human instructions, its behavior becomes hard to predict. More pessimistic observers even worry the worst-case outcome could be the end of human civilization.

Setting aside doomsday scenarios, the more immediate frustration for everyday users is the actual experience — so-called "AI slop" and pervasive algorithmic recommendations are making search, social media, and device use increasingly irritating. That's why "reducing AI" has become a genuine user demand.

Block AI Overviews in Search

The first tip targets Google Search. Google's AI Overviews frequently appear at the top of search results, but many users don't need these auto-generated summaries.

Simply add -AI (a hyphen followed by AI, no space) to the end of your search query to suppress AI Overviews and filter AI-generated content out of your results. This trick has been around for a while — Google just doesn't advertise it.

The value of tips like this is that they return control to the user. In a product landscape designed to surround you with AI by default, opting out often requires knowing where to look.

Google AI Overviews rolled out broadly to U.S. users in 2024 and immediately sparked controversy after several "hallucination" incidents — for example, suggesting users glue cheese to pizza or providing incorrect medical advice. The feature automatically pulls content from multiple web pages and synthesizes a single answer, displayed above the traditional blue links, allowing users to "get an answer" without ever clicking through to the original source. This dealt a significant blow to content creators and news sites, and sparked widespread debate about accuracy and copyright. The -AI operator is a type of Google Advanced Search Operator — technically it tells the search engine to exclude results containing that specific word, but the community discovered it also suppresses the rendering of AI Overviews as a side effect. It is not an officially documented feature in Google's help pages.

Bring Your Feed Back to Chronological Order and Real People

The algorithms that power social media recommendations are also fundamentally AI — and they don't always work in users' favor. Some platforms still offer the option to turn off algorithmic ranking and restore a traditional timeline.

On Instagram, tap the Instagram logo at the top and select "Following" to see posts from people you actually follow, sorted chronologically, with no AI recommendations mixed in. This more human-centered browsing experience can significantly reduce the feeling of being led around by an algorithm.

Turn Off Apple Intelligence and Siri

IPhone users are about to get deeper AI integration, especially with the major Siri upgrade on the way. If you don't feel like you need a "super-smart" Siri — or don't need Siri at all — you can opt out.

• On iOS 26: Go to Settings → Apple Intelligence and turn it off.
• On the upcoming iOS 27: Go to Settings → Siri and turn Siri off directly.

If you want to remove Apple Intelligence entirely, the process is a bit more involved — but Apple has documented the full steps on its official support page, so you can follow along there.

Make Your Social Accounts Private

The final tip is to set all your social media accounts to private. This is good privacy hygiene in general, and in the age of AI it takes on new significance: if you don't want your data used to train AI models, a private account provides at least a basic layer of protection.

That said, the original author admits there's no good solution for TikTok — you can basically assume that everything on the platform is either AI-generated, being used to train AI, or both.

The terms of service for most major social platforms typically include broad authorization allowing them to use publicly shared content to "improve products and services." With the rise of generative AI, this clause effectively means public posts, images, and videos can be fed into model training datasets. Meta announced in 2024 that it would use public content from European users to train its AI, then paused after regulatory pressure. When an account is set to private, content is only visible to approved followers, technically limiting the platform's ability to scrape and use it at scale — though the platform itself still holds the data even in private mode. Compared to fully public accounts, this step meaningfully reduces the likelihood of content being used by third parties or the platform's own AI projects.

A Different Way to Look at the "Hassle"

Removing all these AI features from your life one by one does sound like a lot of work. But here's a more optimistic frame: the very features you find annoying might turn out to be a reason to spend less time scrolling social media in the first place.

The point of all this isn't to write off AI entirely — it's to remind users that in a world where technology keeps defaulting to "add more AI," the ability to actively choose otherwise is itself a form of protecting your attention and your data.