I recently saw a post on mastodon which said that someone was actively looking for a code editor that had absolutely no "AI" features. It did not strike me as a wishlist for nostalia's sake. It made me realize that in the rush to integrate artificial intelligence into every aspect of our digital lives, a growing number of companies have diminished the concept of opt-in by choice, it is now being turned into opt-in by default.

I see a growing sentiment of people online who resent the addition of AI into their otherwise beloved or daily use software. Some variation of, "I wish AI was not thrusted into XYZ"

There are sections of professionals who are growing increasingly untrustworthy of companies that do this. And many people have started calling them out as well. It looks like the general sentiment in the tech world is that any company that does not integrate AI is a relic of the past. This erronious notion reminds many of the yesteryear dot com bubble. Products that had no need for AI integration now come with one. Whether users want it or not. Sometimes, things like Gemini are baked into your email client, quitely running in the background, pretending to help you read and write your emails and categorize them and whatnot. This extends way beyond email.

I believe that the problem lies way beyond the fact that AI is everywhere or that top governments are now only actively involved in the AI conversations. The pushback mostly comes because it is seen as forced. Let me mention a few examples off the top of my head. Take Adobe's products in the last couple years. I read somewhere that they have an option to utilize user content for their AI product development and that toggle also conveniently stays on by default. Let's not even get into the privacy and moral implications of that data collection mechanism because that would severely off-road this post. What about their crown-jewel Photoshop? Want to use it without generative fill suggestions popping up every five seconds? Well, good luck finding that setting buried several menus deep within their interface. The same goes for the AI features in their PDF reader, Acrobat.

The omnipresent Microsoft Word now "helpfully" rewrites your sentences as you type, because apparently your own thoughts are not good enough anymore. They boast about it as if it's such a breakthrough - "Copilot in Word helps people write, edit, and understand documents". Even note-taking apps like Notion have jumped on the bandwagon, cramming AI writing assistants into interfaces that were perfectly functional without them.

The audacity is what many find breathtaking. Companies are basically telling us that their software was not complete before, that we've been using inferior tools all along. Another example? The RAM-hoarder Slack, which now has AI that summarizes conversations. I don't use it but I've been told that Spotify premium has an AI DJ now!

What's particularly puzzling to me, is why some companies want to frame resistance that users are showing as Luddism (yes, I googled that word, it fits the meaning most closely). Do you dislike AI in your browser, gallery app, personal note taking app, your voice recorder? Well, get on with the times because you must hate progress. Do you prefer writing without algorithmic slop suggestions? Are you living in 1980? I call this corporate gaslighting.

To touch a bit more on my previous point, the privacy implications alone are worth discussing in a larger context. When GitHub's Copilot scans your code, where does that data go? Do you own your code? When Grammarly's AI analyzes your writing, who else gets to see it? These companies are asking the user (the one who pays them in some cases) to feed their creative work into their data mining operations.

Another point that comes to mind is the performance hit. Planned obsolescence is accelerting, no thanks to software with these features abundant. Even browsers have joined the party. Firefox and Chrome all come bundled with AI features now and that feature list uses more RAM than before. We're sacrificing efficiency for features most people never asked for and don't use.

The educational aspect has divided most people too. One camp says AI is here to stay, so students should just adapt to using it. Another camp says that students are growing up with AI-assisted everything and never learn to struggle through problems independently, which affects their cognition, creativity and problem solving skills. I read stories on twitter where people had colleagues with code editors that autocomplete entire functions. Will this create a generation of programmers who can't easily debug their own logic? I leave that question open because I don't have an answer. Essays are being written for students using chatGPT and it seems like every other week, there's some teacher complaining about it online.

On the cultural front, are we not normalizing the idea that human creativity needs artificial enhancement? I've read tech-journalists and industry veterans say that these AI integrations are half-baked solutions looking for problems to solve. Password managers with AI that suggests secure passwords. Why? Was not random generation already solving that problem perfectly? Last week, I saw a typical problem where someone's calendar app with AI scheduling was not able to figure out why he does not want meetings during lunch.

This is why I made a no-ai-software repository on GitHub. The irony of hosting it on there is not lost on me, I chose it just for the network effect and nothing else. I want a place to exist that highlights and helps people discover projects that champion this philosophy.

The directory hopes to serve as a curated list for those of us seeking tools that align with this mindset. I hope it turns into a community-driven effort to find and categorize software...all the way from text editors to entire operating systems...to little softwares or apps people use that are either explicitly AI-free or allow for a completely opt-in approach.

I welcome suggestions to improve it and additions to the (for now) incomplete list.