forcing the use of ai is how you lose customers

Google released a new feature for Google messages and it's called Remix. This feature adds a massive button with a banana emoji over your photos in messages to run your photos through Gemini to generate your typical AI slop. At first I was just annoyed because I would just find a way to disable it just like I was able to disable Gemini. Turns out as of today, you cannot remove this feature unless you turn off RCS completely.

I have a pretty high tolerance for annoying things that companies force down our throats but this one crossed a line for me. I've been on a mission to figure out how to degoogle as much as I can. I've already replaced Google Photos with Immich and replaced search with Kagi but peeling away GMail is going to be difficult. I know I won't be able to completely get rid of it but I'll be damned if I'm not going to go out of my way to continue avoiding Google.

It's so telling how scared these companies are because they know the adoption rate for AI is not where they want it to be. They know customers will mostly choose not to use them if they made it optional or easy to disable. I'm so done with all of this... if you're a company that is actively trying to force AI on the product, consider me a lost customer.

Update 12-14-25:

Just ran into this article and had to add it here: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/microsoft-scales-back-ai-goals-because-almost-nobody-is-using-copilot