How to be an AI minimalist

Even before the latest batch of alarming AI news , a lot of Americans were souring on AI.

That may be for big, existential reasons — concerns about widening inequality , mass job loss , and the still-unclear environmental impact of data centers — or for very specific, personal, everyday ones, like being forced to use a worse version of Google search.

None of this is to say that AI cannot be a useful tool for some people some of the time.

It’s just that the untested technology was thrust upon millions of people who didn’t necessarily ask for it and really seem to not like it.

More than twice as many Americans distrust AI as trust it, and a growing number of people think it will have a negative impact on productivity and economic growth, according to a recent survey by Gallup and the Special Competitive Studies Project.

While about half of Americans now report using chatbots, a majority also think that AI will put their personal information at risk and nearly half think it will have a negative impact on society, according to a 2026 Pew study .

“It’s being forced on users, there’s no clear way to turn it off, and it feels like this unwelcome addition to their lives,” Rory Mir of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends digital privacy and free speech, told me.

Mir told me.

“It’s this kind of continued pattern of disrespect to users that I think is part of the pushback.” If you want less AI in your life, opting out is not always easy.

But there are things you can do to minimize your exposure.

There are ways to turn off AI features, although the process can be tedious.

There are also steps you can take to prevent your data from being used to train AI models, though it’s difficult to keep all of your online data away from web scrapers.

I talked to five experts — including a computer scientist and a researcher studying AI resistance — who offered distinctive perspectives on what AI is doing to us, and who shared some simple and concrete steps you can take to push back against AI’s creep into our daily lives.

The AI that’s suddenly everywhere In the early days, which were just a few years ago, you really had to know what you were doing if you wanted to test out AI.