It’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid AI when you open your phone or laptop. As soon as I started writing this article in Google Docs, it offered AI writing assistance (I didn’t take advantage of it). And with the rollout of Apple Intelligence, it now extends to iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
But you’re not alone if you don’t find much value in the Apple Intelligence features released so far. According to a recent survey, about three-quarters of iPhone owners don’t understand what all the fuss is about. It’s also worth noting that these AI add-ons will (and will continue to) take up 7GB of local storage on every device you use.
The good news is that Apple Intelligence is opt-in and fairly easy to disable. Not every company does this with their AI tools (looking at you Google or Microsoft). So if you think features like writing tools or broken notifications summary are unnecessary for your needs, you can turn them off.
Assuming you’ve already turned it on, here’s how to turn off certain features in Apple Intelligence. If you really don’t like it, here’s how to turn it off completely.
(The steps listed below were tested on an iPhone 15 Pro Max running iOS 18.2. Similar options are available on iPadOS and macOS.)
Turn off individual Apple Intelligence features
You can individually disable most, but not all, Apple Intelligence features. When you open Settings on your iPhone, you’ll see a menu dedicated to Apple Intelligence and Siri. After that it depends on what you want to disable.
Chat GPT
(ChatGPT Extensions) to enable or disable additional AI smart features that ChatGPT can add to Siri when asking for a response.
notification
AI notification summaries, which have gotten Apple into trouble lately, can also be turned off individually. From iOS Settings, select (Notifications) > (Notification Summary) to turn off this feature. You can also enable it for certain apps and disable it for others from the same screen.
Writing tools / image creation
You can turn off Burning Tools and Image Creation, but you’ll need to run Screen Time in Settings.
It’s a bit of a clumsy fix, actually meant to prevent kids from cheating on their homework, but it works. There are no pop-up options to rewrite the text, and you cannot create new source characters. When you open the Image Playground app on iOS, the option to create a new photo is blocked (but you can still access previously saved photos).
Prioritizing messages
Apple Mail’s AI-powered message prioritization is also a feature that can be turned off separately. More precisely, it can be made invisible.
Your inbox will return to the state it was in before Apple Intelligence arrived.
There’s very little about Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2 that can’t be disabled. There are cleanup tools in Photos and Intelligent Breakthrough features in Focus, but you can easily ignore these options if you don’t need them.
Turn off Apple Intelligence completely on your iPhone
If you really don’t want to interact with Apple Intelligence and have it already enabled, you can disable it completely.
When you turned on this toggle switch for the first time, iOS downloaded the AI models needed for local processing to your phone. These models take up around 7 GB of space and will remain on your iPhone regardless of whether you enable Apple Intelligence.
If you want to disable Apple Intelligence to free up space used by local iOS models, you must reset your iPhone and start over without enabling Apple Intelligence during setup. To do this, go to Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Erase All Content and Settings. Of course, this will erase everything on your phone, so make sure all your important data is safely backed up.
At least for now, you have plenty of control over active Apple Intelligence features. However, we know there are more AI upgrades coming in the future, so we’ll have to wait and see if Apple Intelligence remains an optional addition to the iPhone.
