I turned off all AI features on my Pixel phone — and instantly regretted it

I had this realization — epiphany of sorts — that while we’ve become more conscious of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, we often use AI much more than we actively perceive. Every app you touch on your phone has some kind of smarts and automation baked in. It’s constantly learning from your patterns and improving in the background.

That nudged me to experiment with becoming more intentional about these AI additions and disable them for a cleaner look and feel. No smart suggestions I mindlessly use, no Assistant to speak to, and no on-device smarts. All turned off.

I enthusiastically planned to do this for a week, but I soon realized I was being too optimistic. What sounded like a solid digital detox plan turned into a quiet reckoning: my phone is a well-oiled system with subtle automations I don’t think I can live without anymore.

I imagined turning off smart features across all my main apps would feel like going back to the good-old Nokia bar phone days. Nostalgia made that seem enticing — something I thought I’d actually want — but practically, it was far from rosy.

The most frustrated I got during my time off AI was with Gboard. Without swipe typing, predictive text, and autocorrect — the very features we all love to meme about — my entire phone felt broken. The number and variety of misspellings I could come up with made me question my self-worth as a writer. And fixing each one of them made me a painfully slow typist. Group chats would often move on from a topic by the time I’d finished typing my take — total Internet Explorer–style late blooming.

In Google Photos, edits became much more manual. While I enjoy playing with contrast and tone and whatnot myself, I really missed the one-tap fixes that helped with lighting and gave me a quick, clean version to share on Instagram or at least build on. More importantly, I couldn’t use any of the smart editing features you get a Pixel for — Magic Editor, Photo Unblur, Best Take. Without them, it was like going back to the cave days of modern tech (2010, I mean).

Oh, and I had to completely disable Gemini/Google Assistant. I honestly felt like Joaquin Phoenix in Her, sorely missing his AI companion. I couldn’t ask it to control smart home devices or help with Android Auto — everything became manual. I had to now type out my reminders, and changing music in the car turned into a dangerously distracting chore.

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

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

Without Pixel’s Live Captions, I couldn’t watch videos in noisy places and ended up saving them for later — not to consume more intentionally, but out of frustration.

Gmail and Google Messages no longer suggested quick replies or helped finish my sentences. I had to type out full messages and emails like it was 2015.

Maps stopped telling me when to leave home based on traffic, and it didn’t remember my parking spot either. Once, I forgot where I’d parked because I didn’t save the location manually.

Google Photos stopped resurfacing old memories during the day — no surprise moments with friends, family, or random mountain dogs I clicked a decade ago.

Not getting to see dog photos randomly is the lowest kind of inferiority in life.

Besides sparing me time to coin my own words, the lack of AI on my phone did help in a few ways. You must’ve already guessed the first one — battery life benefits. I couldn’t track it rigorously since I had limited time with this setup, but the gains were in the 10–15% range, which was noticeably better than usual.

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

But was it enough to keep me on this routine? You already know the answer to this, too.

That was me last weekend, soon after I started the experiment. The lack of AI smarts was annoying at first, then it got frustrating enough to slow down my regular day. Simple things took twice the time, especially without Gboard’s assistive typing.

And that’s when it hit me that AI isn’t just Gemini or the ChatGPT app. It’s ambient. It works in the background, often silently, making tiny decisions and smoothing over rough edges without drawing attention to itself. Quiet enough to fade in the background — until you turn it all off.

Hopefully, this little try-out gives you a good idea of why it’s not worth trying for yourself. Convenience is the point of AI, and I’m all for it.

Like I said, I lasted far fewer days than I’d planned. I remembered the exact sequence in which I turned everything off and flicked it all back on just as quickly. I want Photos to clean up distracting objects in my shots. I want the Assistant to find my playlist while I’m driving. And I absolutely cannot live without Gboard’s smarts.

So yes, I’m back to using my smart-phone the way it was meant to be — smartly.