The AI you didn’t choose
The guides are about adding AI on purpose. Staying Safe is about someone using it against you. This section is the third case, and the most common one: AI that simply turned up — in your browser, your phone, the programs you already paid for, and inside organisations making decisions about your money, your housing and your health.
When a computer decides something about you
A loan refused, an application rejected, a claim denied. Often decided by software, never described that way. The four sentences that get a person to look again.
Read this → Cloud chatbots · 7 min readUsing a cloud chatbot on purpose
For anyone who isn’t going to install a thing. Three settings to change once, what never to paste, and what deleting a conversation actually does.
Read this → Things that act for you · 7 min readWhen it acts on your behalf
A tool that answers is one thing. A tool that clicks, buys and sends is another. What changes, and the rules worth setting first.
Read this → Off switches · 6 min readThe off-switch checklist
Half an hour, highest value first, across your browser, computer, phone and accounts. Written as things to search for, because menus move.
Read this → Chapter 05 · 7 min readTurning off the AI you didn’t ask for
The principle behind the checklist: the two kinds of off switch, where these settings hide, and what isn’t worth turning off.
Read this →Why this is its own section
The guides teach a skill you build up: install a model, keep your files private, work offline, spend nothing. Each chapter leans on the one before it.
Nothing here works that way. These pages stand alone and apply whether or not you ever run a model yourself. What they share is the situation rather than the skill — software that arrived without being invited, and in some cases without being mentioned at all.
The thread running through it
Every page here comes back to the same sentence: you decide what runs, and you decide what sees your information.
Sometimes that means finding a switch. Sometimes it means declining a feature that would act for you. And sometimes — when the decision is being made inside somebody else’s organisation — it means asking, in writing, for a person to look at your file. That last one is the hardest and the most worth doing.