Five annoying tech things to turn off right now

You can (and should) put a stop to Apple’s bonkers AI summaries and the clickety sounds as you type on your phone.

5 min
A jack-in-the-box springs open with a phone full of notifications
(Illustration by Emma Kumer/The Washington Post)
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Give yourself a precious gift this holiday season and ditch annoying technology crud.

And while your loved ones are stewing in a post-Thanksgiving haze, grab someone else’s phone and turn off these things, too. They’ll thank you later, probably.

Google’s AI ‘overviews’

Why you should turn them off: Google’s artificial-intelligence-aided “answers” at the top of some search results vary in quality, from good to moderately pointless to preposterous — like mixing glue into pizza sauce.

Using AI also gobbles energy and water. And some websites are worried that the AI overviews perpetuate Google’s trend of keeping you inside the company’s digital walls rather than encouraging clicking to the rest of the internet.

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