Tech Companies Pushing AI on Everyone and How to Turn off Google Gemini

As you might have seen in recent days, Microsoft is raising the prices of Office 365 subscriptions to cover the costs of using CoPilot features whether you want those AI capabilities or not. Apple has recently enabled AI sharing via Siri with most apps you use on Apple devices, but at least they have not raised their prices based on that yet, though you have the annoying and time-consuming task of going through every app and checking that AI sharing is turned off.

Not to be outdone, Google just decided to turn on Gemini for all Google Workspace accounts, except for primary, secondary, and K12 Google for Workspace Education institutions. Probably, because they realize how flaky the technology is and likely to cause harm to minors. And think about all the children privacy invading details Google would be scooping up with Gemini without the ability to divest of that information easily and not fall foul of COPPA, which seems to be the only privacy law we have going for us in the United States and one that is being currently used to sue Google.

You might think enabling Google Gemini is fantastic in a business setting and it is for certain use cases, but not a blanket allow that Google just rolled out. With blanket Gemini on, you run the risks of giving up your intellectual property to Google and also incurring data privacy regulation violations and fines with having personal data from privacy strict countries shared with Google without those individuals' consent or notice. Every data you have within your corporate email, calendar, docs, sheets, slides may suddenly become part of Gemini knowledgeable without the ability to know where that information goes or how Google uses it for their purposes. The best part is that Google is raising their prices for all Google Workspace users to pay for Gemini, and you have no ability to not pay for Gemini, whether you end up using it or not.

This might be a great market opportunity for another tech company to release a number of office products without AI built-in or at least allowing customers to decide whether they want to pay for those features.

What do you all think about this? Are you happy with these changes and believe this is the way going forward? Or would you rather control your own tech costs and feature rollout availability?

p.s. For those of you that want to disable Gemini altogether or allow it only for select groups and users, please go to https://support.google.com/a/answer/14571493 or see the instructions below, taken from Google's support forum. Please note that you will need to be logging in as a Google Workspace admin in order to make these changes to control your organization's access to Gemini:

Turn the?Gemini app?on or off

1. Sign in with an administrator account to the Google?Admin?console.If you aren’t using an administrator account, you can’t access the Admin console.
2. In the Admin console, go to Menu??Generative AI > Gemini.
3. Click?Service status.
4. To turn a service on or off for everyone in your organization, click?On for everyone or?Off for everyone, and then click?Save.
5. (Optional) To turn a service on or off?for?an organizational unit:
6. a. At the left, select the organizational unit.To change the Service status, select?On or?Off.
7. b. Choose one:
8. - If the Service status is set to?Inherited?and you want to keep the updated setting, even if the parent setting changes, click Override.
9. - If the Service status is set to?Overridden, either click Inherit to revert to the same setting as its parent, or click?Save to keep the new setting, even if the parent setting changes.
10. Note: Learn more about organizational structure.
11. (Optional) To turn on a service for a set of users across or within organizational units, select an access group. For details, go to Use groups to customize service access.
12. Click Save.

Changes can take up to 24 hours but typically happen more quickly.