Can We Turn Off AI Tools From Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta? Sometimes...

'Who asked for any of this in the first place?' wonders a New York Times consumer-tech writer. (Alternate URL here.) 'Judging from the feedback I get from readers, lots of people outside the tech industry remain uninterested in AI — and are increasingly frustrated with how difficult it has become to ignore.'

The companies rely on user activity to train and improve their AI 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 AI-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 AI 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 AI 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 AI 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 AI tools or data collection, where possible. I'll walk you through the steps.
The article suggests logged-in Google users can toggle settings at myactivity.google.com. (Some browsers also have extensions that force Google's search results to stop inserting an AI summary at the top.) And you can also tell Edge to remove Copilot from its sidebar at edge://settings.

But 'There is no way for users to turn off Meta AI, Meta said. Only in regions with stronger data protection laws, including the EU and Britain, can people deny Meta access to their personal information to build and train Meta's AI.'

On Instagram, for instance, people living in those places can click on 'settings,' then 'about' and 'privacy policy,' which will lead to opt-out instructions. Everyone else, including users in the United States, can visit the Help Center on Facebook to ask Meta only to delete data used by third parties to develop its AI.

By comparison, when Apple releases new AI services this month, users will have to opt in, according to the article. 'If you change your mind and no longer want to use Apple Intelligence, you can go back into the settings and toggle the Apple Intelligence switch off, which makes the tools go away.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.