I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it

Summary

At first, all of this AI stuff felt exciting. I was curious to try everything (I was actually one of the few naive people who thought the Rabbit R1 was a good product before it eventually launched), and for a while, it felt useful. But over time, I realized AI isn't just affecting smartphones; it's creeping into all consumer tech, often making products worse instead of better. What started as something promising has become a constant stream of gimmicks and distractions I didn't ask for. AI features are making products worse, not better Good products replaced with trendy gimmicks Somewhere along the way, tech companies forgot what made their products great in the first place. Every update now seems to revolve around AI, even if it means breaking what already worked. The focus isn't on refining the experience anymore; it's about finding new places to wedge in an AI assistant, a chatbot, or some vaguely "smart" feature that adds little value to the people actually using it. Gemini is a perfect example. Google replaced Assistant with something that was supposed to be smarter, but in practice, it just got in the way. Simple commands started taking longer, and half the time, it couldn't even do something as basic as turning on my lights. The LLM inference delay alone made me stop using it altogether. I went back to the old Google Assistant because, at least, it worked when I needed it to. Apple isn't doing much better. Siri was already horrible to begin with, but with Apple Intelligence, it has somehow managed to get even worse. Microsoft has fallen into the same trap. Copilot is everywhere in Windows now — pinned to the taskbar, forced into apps, and even sometimes showing up as ads on the lock screen. It feels less like a helpful feature and more like something Microsoft wants to constantly shove in my face, taking up space I'd rather use for things that actually matter. Credit: Raghav Sethi/MakeUseOf Even Arc, which has been my daily browser since its beta days, couldn...