Four Tools Added AI Features This Year. I Turned Three of Them Off.

Four of the tools I pay for shipped a prominent AI feature in the last year. In each case it arrived switched on, in a place I look at often, and in three cases I have since turned it off. I want to describe how I decided, because “AI feature bad” is not my position and neither is the opposite.

The one I kept is in my email client and it does exactly one thing: when a message arrives that contains a date or a time, it offers a small button to put it in the calendar. It is not conversational, it does not summarise anything, and it is right about ninety percent of the time. When it is wrong, it is obviously wrong and I ignore it. That is a good feature and I would miss it.

The three I turned off share a shape. Each replaced something I could previously see with something I now have to trust.

The first was a summary at the top of long documents in a tool I use for client work. It was well written and often accurate. The problem is that I could no longer tell, when I opened a document I had not read, whether I was remembering the document or the summary. After about a month I noticed I had started skimming things I would previously have read, and that the skimming was invisible to me. That is a real cost with no visible symptom, which is the hardest kind to catch.

The second was suggested replies in a messaging tool. The suggestions were plausible and I used them, and the messages I sent got shorter and blander over about six weeks. Nobody complained. I noticed because I reread a thread and could not tell my messages from a stranger’s. Whether that matters depends on the relationship, and for colleagues I work with daily I decided it did.

The third was a search that answered instead of finding. Previously typing a phrase gave me the documents containing it; now it gave me a synthesised answer with a citation. When it worked, it was faster. When it was wrong or incomplete, I had no way to know, because the thing it replaced — the list of what actually matched — was gone. A tool that removes your ability to check its work has changed what it is, not just how fast it is.

The test I have settled on is: does this feature add something beside what was there, or does it stand in front of it? The calendar button adds. The summary stands in front of the document; the search answer stands in front of the results. Anything in the second category needs to be much more reliable than these currently are, because you lose the ability to notice when it is not.

A practical note that applies regardless of your view. In three of the four cases, the setting to turn it off was not in the obvious place and in one it was not in the account settings at all but in a per-workspace admin panel. Budget ten minutes and expect to search the support documentation. The default is on, the default is remembered as your choice, and a year from now nobody involved will remember that you never chose it.