I turned off all AI features on my pixel phone -and immediately regretted

I had this recognition – epifany of kind – that while we have become more conscious of Generative AI tools like Chatgpt and GeminiWe often use AI much more than we actively perceive. Each app you touch on your phone has a kind of smart and automation baked in. It constantly learns from your patterns and improves you in the background.

It pushed me to experiment with becoming more intentionally about these AI extensions and disabled them for a cleaner look and feel. No smart suggestions I use mindless, no assistant to talk to and no devices on devices. Everyone turned off.

I planned to do this for a week, but I soon realized that I was too optimistic. What sounded like a solid digital detox plan became a quiet bill: My phone is a good oiled system with subtle automation I don’t think I can live without anymore.

I imagined turning off smart features on all my main apps would feel like going back to the good old Nokia bar telephone days. Nostalgia made it seem enticing – something I thought I actually wanted – but practically, it was far from rosy.

The most frustrated I got during my time AI was with Gboard. Without sweeping, predictive text and autocorrect – The very features we all love to mee – the whole phone felt broken. The number and diversity of misspellings I could come up with made me question my self -esteem as a writer. And fixing each and every one of them made me a painful slow types of types. Group chats would often move on from a theme when I finished entering the roof – Total Internet Explorer -style late flowering.

On Google images, editors became much more manual. While I like to play with contrast and tone and what not myself, I really missed the one-print dishes that helped with lighting and gave me a quick, clean version to share on Instagram or at least build on. Even more important, I couldn’t use any of the smart editing features you get a pixel for – Magic EditorPhoto unblur, best take. Without them, it was like going back to Cave Days of Modern Tech (2010, I mean).

Oh, and I had to disable completely Gemini/Google Assistant. I honestly felt like Joaquin Phoenix in HerMissed Hans AI Computer. I couldn’t ask it to control smart home units or help with Android Auto – everything became manual. I now had to print my reminders, and change music in the car became a dangerously distracting task.

That’s when I noticed how often I absent said ‘Ok Google’ while walking around the house. I guess we’ve all been in Her Ery all the time without realizing it.

Beyond the big ticket features I lost, I found myself stumbled without all the little ones too.

Without Pixel’s living captions, I couldn’t watch videos in noisy places and ended up saving them later – not consuming more on purpose, but of frustration.

Gmail and Google messages no longer suggested quick responses or helped complete my sentences. I had to print full messages and e -mail messages as if it were 2015.

Maps stopped telling me when I was leaving home based on traffic, nor did it remember my parking lot. Once I forgot where I had parked because I didn’t save the place manually.

Google images stopped restoring old memories during the day – no surprising moment with friends, family or random mountain dogs I clicked a decade ago.

Not seeing dog images randomly is the lowest type of subordinateness in life.

In addition to saving me to mint my own words, the lack of AI helped my phone in a few ways. You must have already guessed the first – Advantages of battery life. I couldn’t track it strictly since I had limited time with this setup, but the winnings were in the range of 10-15%, which was noticeably better than usual.

More importantly, the phone just felt quieter. No unnecessary notifications, no screen information every half hour with nudges I didn’t need. It felt more analog – as a tool I checked, not something that unconsciously controlled me. I picked it up when I needed, not because I was tempted to see what was waiting for me.

But was it enough to stay on this routine? You already know the answer to this as well.

It was me last weekend, just after I started the experiment. The lack of AI Smarts was annoying to begin with, then it became frustrating enough to slow down my regular day. Simple things took double time, especially without Gboard’s assistant writing.

And that’s when it struck me that Ai isn’t just the Gemini or Chatgpt app. It is surrounding. It works in the background, often silently, makes small decisions and smooths over rough edges without drawing attention to themselves. Quiet enough to fade in the background – until you turn it all off.

Hopefully, this little trial gives you a good idea why it is not worth trying yourself. Compliance is the point of AI, and I’m all for it.

As I said, I lasted far fewer days than I had planned. I remembered the exact sequence where I turned off and flicked it all on just as quickly. I want images to clean up distracting items in my shoots. I want the assistant to find my playlist while driving. And I certainly can’t live without Gboard’s smart.

So yes, I’m back to using my smartphone as it was meant to be-smart.