Plea for advice (I checked tech news again)
These past few months, the uptick in services that have tacked on AI to their existing software has skyrocketed. Beyond the objective growing of the bubble, I also sometimes go check tech news in AlternativeTo and find myself horrified at the ratio of features and bugfix news in relation to AI-related changes. My phone keeps rolling out more intricate updates that turn machine learning features back on after I carefully turned them off a month ago, or add new toggles.
It feels truly inescapable, with the lengths that the companies will go to avoid turning off those features, presumably because they are invaluable when it comes to data collection. And I do want to escape it. I don't want my own words and those of my friends repackaged at a charge. I don't want automatic curation of feeds, music, books. I want to use the Internet and my computing devices to connect with people, to build things together that require both care and effort. These features don't make my life easier, they make my life vulnerable to surveillance and exploitation.
Genuine question: How can I remain free of the expectation of AI usage? Are there any ways in which I can orient my online experience to be less vulnerable to these changes in policy? How can I make my stay on this Internet'd Earth more encouraging of manual curation and recognizing my own and others' effort to make things good without corporate profit mediating these interactions?