Rise Up, People! Make AI Optional!

One impressive woman demands Opt-In buttons for AI features

When you do a Google search these days, you generally see an AI Overview panel above the search results. It’s intended to summarize the answers to your query, so you don’t have to click any links.

The first problem: By Google’s own calculations, the AI Overviews are incorrect 15% of the time.

The bigger problem: AI is an environmental disaster. It’s already a monstrous energy hog, and its appetite is doubling every six months. (You can thank the 4,200 data centers that AI companies have built all over the country so far. 1,500 more are going up as we speak.)

By 2030, AI will consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity—enough to power every household in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania combined.

60% of that will come from polluting power sources.

Even if you don’t care about the heating planet, you might care about your power bill. AI’s power needs have driven up electricity costs as much as 15% in the last year, with another 8.5% hike coming by the end of 2026.

Or you might care about rolling blackouts during heat waves, which power utilities are anticipating as soon as this summer.

It’s not just Google, of course. Every company is rushing to slap AI into their products. For example, there’s also

• Zoom’s automatic note taker.

• Canva’s design suggestions, layout recommendation, style matching, AI-assisted resizing, content recommendations.

• Constant Contact drafts entire newsletters without your asking.

• Gmail. In paid plans, AI writes an email response before you’ve asked for it.

• Google Meet, Google Slides, Google Docs are also laden with AI features in paid plans.

• Bing has its own version of AI Overview.

• Yahoo has spouted AI features in News, Sports, Mail, and Search.

And Sheila Morovati has had enough.

The Sheila Factor

Morovati is the founder and president of a nonprofit called HabitsofWaste.org, based in LA.

“There’s no way you get around these AI features, and it’s all coming at us at a pace faster than we can figure out how to turn them off,” she says. “I have yet to find an Off switch on most of these.”

She’s so fed up, in fact, that she’s started a campaign to pressure the software companies.

“At the very least, we want an Off switch. But studies show that opting out doesn’t work as well as opting into something. So I think the default has to change.”

Her movement is therefore called Opt-In AI. “The goal is to provide no AI at all unless someone asks for it. We think the default setting should be the most sustainable and least annoying option.”

Morovati has no beef with people who want or use the AI features. “If someone wants the AI tools, they have an On switch,” she says. For everyone else, “we’re just wasting resources and energy for no reason.”

Who’s Sheila?

So this one woman in California wants to force Google, Zoom, and Microsoft to change their ways? Well, sure. And I want world peace.

But here’s the thing: Sheila Morovati may be a force of one, but she’s also a force of nature.

She is not a scientist, not a billionaire, not a politician. But she has a stunning track record of bringing attention to egregious waste and pollution.

It started with the crayons. Restaurants give a fresh pack to every little kid, so they can draw while they wait for the food. Unfortunately, after the kids leave, the restaurants were then throwing the lightly used crayons away—150 million of them a year, going into the dump, where they never decompose.

So the restaurants had a crayon-disposal problem—but it occurred to Morovati that LA schools had a not-enough–crayons problem. She engineered a pipeline whereby the used-once crayons go from the restaurants to the schools. Today, millions of pieces of plastic are diverted from the landfill and delivered with joy to kids who want to draw.

That was her first foray into one-person activism, but it would not be her last. She ran programs that addressed plastic straws, broken drinking fountains in LA schools, double-boxed consumer products, and disposable water bottles on TV and movie sets.

But her masterstroke was the Cut Out Cutlery program.

For years, restaurants automatically chucked plastic cutlery (not recyclable) into every takeout and delivery order. This was food people intended to consume at home, where they already own cutlery. As a result, people threw those plastic utensils directly into the trash. This wasn’t single-use plastic; it was zero-use plastic.

So Morovati undertook a campaign to convince Uber, Grubhub, Postmates, and DoorDash to change their apps… so that “Include plastic cutlery” would be a checkbox that’s turned off by default.

Incredibly, she succeeded. All four companies eventually agreed. Today, you don’t get plastic unless you ask for it. Sheila Morovati—one person—figured out how to keep 2.5 billion plastic-cutlery packs out of the landfill each year, about 25 metric tons of plastic.

And now she’s at it again.

Google responds

There are Off switches for every conceivable Google feature.

So why isn’t there an Off switch for the AI Overview?

I asked Google. A spokesperson got back to me with a masterful non-answer:

“People love our AI experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews, and they’re coming back to Search more,” he wrote.

He did offer a solution for people who don’t need the AI Overview: “We offer a ‘Web’ filter to see links only. This allows you to narrow your results to text-based links to web pages. But people only use it for a tiny fraction of searches.”

Ya think?

Of course nobody uses the Web view. First, because it’s hidden in a menu called More, which I’m guessing you’ve never even opened.

Second, even if you know about the hidden command, you can’t choose it until after you’ve done your search—after you’ve already seen the AI Overview, after you’ve already consumed the power and water necessary to create it, after the damage is done!

The spokesman also pointed out that the “cost” of Google’s AI features is going down over time—by 30 percent in the most recent models. But the “cost” of an AI feature incorporates the number of computations, the hardware speed, the rates they pay for cloud storage and processing, and so on; it doesn’t necessarily mean lower power or less pollution.

This white paper makes it clear that Google is aware of the environmental mess that AI generates, and asserts that Google is working hard to improve.

But if that’s true, wouldn’t the ultimate energy and pollution saver be an Off switch?

Rise Up!

If this “I didn’t ask for that” AI stuff bothers you, too, here are two actions you can take right now.

First, it is possible to conduct Google searches without the AI Overview. You just type “-ai” after your query.

That’s not as good as an Off switch, let alone an opt-in switch. But it’s something.

Second, you can join Sheila’s movement. Click here to sign up; you’ll be offered a ready-written email—feel free to edit—that her four-person team will forward to the tech companies.

“We’re teeny tiny, but we’re doing it,” she says. “It takes a little bit of pushing and prodding, but we make things happen.”