Every piece of software I own has quietly sprouted an AI feature I never asked for. Gmail wants to draft my replies for me. Windows wants to summarize my desktop. My search engine wants to hallucinate an answer above the actual results instead of just, you know, giving me the results. Nobody asked me if I wanted any of this. It showed up in an update, defaulted to on, and now it’s squatting in the corner of my screen eating who knows how much of my data.
This is the enshittification playbook, just running its AI lap. Bolt a feature nobody requested onto a product that already worked fine, because it’s cheap to ship and it makes a good line in an investor deck, then bury the off switch three settings menus deep so most people never bother. They ran the same play with ads and “engagement” and subscriptions you can start with one click and cancel through a phone tree.
So when a librarian on Bluesky posted that she’d already done the annoying work of tracking down where every one of these switches actually lives, I sat up.
The Site: notoai.org#
notoai.org redirects to librarian.net/NoToAI, run by Jessamyn West, a librarian whose site has been going since 1999 (tagline: “putting the rarin back in librarian”). It’s a plain, no-nonsense guide to turning off AI features in the stuff most people actually use day to day: Google Workspace, Apple Intelligence and Siri, Windows 11 Copilot, Microsoft 365, Chrome/Edge/Firefox, DuckDuckGo, WhatsApp, Android/Gemini, Zoom. No affiliate links, no newsletter popup, no “10 tips” padding. Just here’s the setting, here’s where to click.
She frames it as an “oxygen mask first” thing: get your own settings sorted before you’re the one someone else asks for help. If you’re the resident tech person in your family or friend group, that’s already your job whether you signed up for it or not. She also points out the actual annoyance here, which is that this isn’t a one-and-done fix. New AI options keep landing pre-switched to on, so you have to go back and recheck this stuff periodically as companies quietly re-opt you in.
Go bookmark it. It only gets more useful as the list of places you need it keeps growing.
Why a Librarian Was the One to Build This#
I have a soft spot for librarians that goes back further than I usually let on. Something like twenty years ago I used to lurk on a mailing list called Stumpers-L, started in 1992 by a library school student named Ann Feeney. The idea was simple. Librarians would post reference questions they’d hit a wall on, a half-remembered book plot, an obscure chemical name, “what’s this food mentioned once in a 1950s cookbook,” and other librarians would just solve it. Nobody was getting paid extra for it. It was just the job. The list ran for over a decade before folding in 2005, and a successor called Project Wombat picked up right where it left off, hosted by Project Gutenberg starting in January 2006. It’s still going, it just lives on Facebook now, as a public group with around 255 members still trading the same kind of stumper questions.
Reading that list was a window into a kind of relentless, patient competence I didn’t see much of anywhere else online. Librarians don’t get to shrug and say “not my department.” Someone walks up with a genuinely weird question and the answer is let’s find out. I recognize that particular flavor of problem, no escape hatch, because I’ve worked plenty of jobs where “I don’t know” wasn’t a door I got to walk through either. You just stayed with it until it was solved, because that was the job. It’s basically the whole profession’s ethos, and NoToAI is that same instinct pointed at a new problem. Nobody assigned Jessamyn West to catalog every AI opt-out switch across a dozen companies’ settings menus. She noticed people needed it, so she went and did the tedious research so the rest of us don’t have to.
That’s the throughline. The mailing list and the website are twenty years and a different medium apart, but it’s the same move: see people stuck, go do the unglamorous work, hand the answer back for free.
The Actual Advice#
If you’re sick of AI features showing up uninvited:
- Start with notoai.org and work through whatever’s actually installed on your machine. You don’t have to knock it all out in one sitting.
- Recheck it periodically. Companies keep re-adding AI features that default to on. That’s not you being paranoid, that’s just how the settings churn.
- If you’re the household’s designated tech support, keep this link on hand so you’re not re-deriving the Gmail Gemini toggle from memory for the fifth time this year.
You don’t have to be anti-AI to want a say in where it shows up. I use AI tools on purpose, for things I’ve actually decided I want help with. What I don’t want is an LLM guessing at my email replies because some product team needed a metric to move this quarter. There’s a real difference between reaching for a tool and having one reach for you first, and right now most of the industry has decided you don’t get to draw that line yourself unless you go dig for the switch. Somebody already dug. Go use it.