You Ask, I Answer: Avoiding Generative AI, Part 3: Software

In today’s episode, you’ll uncover the software and tools you need to navigate a world increasingly dominated by AI, while still maintaining your privacy. You’ll learn which popular applications and services to avoid and discover powerful open-source alternatives for office productivity, web analytics, marketing automation, and more. I’ll also share essential tips for securing your web browser, operating system, and data from AI-powered tracking and data collection. Tune in to empower yourself with the knowledge and tools to protect your digital footprint.

You Ask, I Answer: Avoiding Generative AI, Part 3: Software

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Christopher Penn: This is part three in our series on how to avoid generative AI altogether. My friend and colleague Mar asked, “How do we do this? How do we get rid of generative AI?”

It’s a weird question to answer because, normally, I’m saying the opposite. But we’ve covered legal stuff in part one. We covered infrastructure stuff in part two. Today, we’re going to cover software and tools in part three.

First, applications: things like Office software, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce—you name it. It’s not a surprise: literally everyone is putting generative AI everywhere they possibly can. People are treating it like Nutella, putting it everywhere, whether it’s a good idea or not.

To counteract that, you can’t use those services. You have to use other applications instead. If you’re using Microsoft Office, you need to use a tool like OpenOffice—the open-source product that does not have generative AI capabilities built into it. You run it locally, and, as we talked about in the previous episode, you run a system like Lulu that prohibits it from talking to the internet. Essentially, you block things on an app-by-app level in your operating system. You say, “You may not talk to the internet. You can’t go to the internet for any reason.” That will prevent it from sending data—intentionally or not—somewhere else.

If you’ve got a website, you can’t use Google Analytics, period, end of story. You can’t use anything Google. You want to use an open-source product like Matomo to do your web analytics. Again, take a look at the terms of service. There are plenty of other services. But, if you want to be sure that your data is not being used by AI, you have to own the software and the hardware that it’s running on.

Instead of HubSpot or other marketing automation services, the open-source product Mautic will do that. Again, you’ve got to administer the server. You’ve got to host it and own it yourself. But if you do, you know that data is not going anywhere else, because it’s yours.

For CRM, again, you can’t use a service like Salesforce, because Salesforce has their Einstein AI in it. You’ve got to use an open-source product like SuiteCRM, SugarCRM, etc. In general, SaaS (Software as a Service) companies and products and solutions in that space are going to be integrating AI. It’s a decent rule of thumb. You have to essentially avoid any form of SaaS software because, just because a vendor says today, “Oh, we’re not using AI in this,” they’re one acquisition away from saying, “Hey, look, we can monetize our data.” The only way to prevent that is to say, “We’re a no-SaaS shop. We use local applications only that are on our hardware that we control.”

For your web browser: can’t use Chrome. Can’t use Chrome derivatives. I would even avoid other commercial browsers. There are some browsers that are privacy-focused—like Brave, the Brave browser, or Firefox—that are very, very privacy-focused. Those are the ones to use. You want to use strict, open-source, ad-blocking software: something like uBlock Origin, that just says, “Nope, no ads. You may not run trackers. You may not collect data of any kind from me. You get nothing.”

In general, you want to use open-source software: software that you download and run that is not typically run by a company. You are allowed to adjust the source code. This comes with obligations: you have to check the licensing on the open-source software for what is not permitted. Just because it’s open-source doesn’t mean it’s private. You want to think about inspecting the code to see what data this code collects, and, “Do I want that?”

You will want to move to an open-source operating system for your devices. On your desktop: some variant of Linux. On your phone: a de-Googled Android that has any references, any code components, to AI removed. You can’t use iOS (Apple iPhone), because Apple is going to be releasing Apple intelligence in iOS 18. You can’t use the commercial versions of Android—the one that ships with most phones—because that’s going to have Google’s AI in it. But you can get the Android code itself and remove the AI components.

The last thing to do on the software front is to regularly monitor news and announcements from your vendors and service providers. Anytime you see an announcement from any vendor saying, “Hey, we’re in a new licensing agreement with Google, with OpenAI, with Anthropic…” you know that they’re just handing over data that those companies can use to build models.

With any vendor that you work with—and we talked about this in the legal section, in part one—any vendor you work with, you’ve got to be ironclad in your contracts: “No AI.” You will want to certainly monitor news announcements from vendors of the past. If there’s a vendor that still has your data, you need to be vigilant about checking the news to see if they’ve entered into any licensing agreements for content, because everyone who’s got content is trying to figure out how to monetize it with AI vendors and license their data sets, because AI companies are offering a lot of money. It’s really hard to say, “Nope, I don’t want money.” It’s very, very hard to say that.

So that’s part three. In the next part, we’re going to talk about marketing itself—the marketing practices and things. I will tell you upfront: marketing is going to get difficult if you want to completely avoid generative AI. But it is possible to some degree, so stay tuned for that.

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You Ask, I Answer: Avoiding Generative AI, Part 3: Software

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