Rejecting AI as much as possible

Going back to that original hope -- rejecting Artificial Intelligence as much as possible -- what does that mean?

I am becoming more aware of the difficulty of opting out.

I had stopped using Google -- and told them about it -- because of their acquiescence on renaming the Gulf of Mexico. I'd also noticed that their search engine was no longer as helpful, but I was thinking of that part of a general downhill trend. 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/02/corporate-communications.html 

I have been using Bing. 

Bing is not that different from Google; the different ways of grouping results and such are all kind of following the same pattern. That pattern includes getting AI results at the top.

I felt very good about scrolling right past those and going on to actual articles and entities and web pages. 

That is reasonable for seeking better sources to avoid the replication of errors. It is good for valuing the creators of content... valuing humans.

Those things are important to me, but so is not killing the planet. If Copilot (Microsoft's AI tool) is running whether I am using the results or not, there is still damage being done.

I thought of this because I saw some complaints from people about not being able to opt out. That was a reasonable concern, but I wasn't sure if it was true.

That is a more complicated question.

I was able to find directions for turning Copilot off in Bing and in Windows, except that the Bing instructions didn't work. For Windows, if you don't have Professional it involves a registry edit, which I have not completely ruled out but it's a little intimidating.

I did submit feedback on it.

I am also going to check out some other search engines. It's very possible that they are all that way, but it's at least worth looking.

It's not perfect. 

Still, there is so much that can be done.

One thing that has become more clear to me is that I need to make the rejections more clear.

It is not just that I am not going to use AI applications to see what I would look like as an elf or as people in four different decades, or that I won't click on those romance novels with AI covers (I wasn't going to anyway), but I will delete them from my feed.

When someone puts up a picture of Muppets or Simpsons characters or anyone else in front of something culturally relevant, I am deleting that from my feed.

If they are using AI, I am going to keep voting "No" and hope that more posts by actual humans show up in my feed.

If I can't be as thorough and effective as I would like, I will make up for it by being exceedingly stubborn.