How to turn off AI in Google Docs, Word, and Scrivener

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

Gemini in Docs, Connected Experiences in Word, a training toggle in Grammarly, and Apple Intelligence inside Scrivener. Here is what each switch actually controls, where it lives, and a link to the page that shows the current clicks.

If you opened Google Docs this year and found a little sparkle offering to help you write, you are not imagining things, and you did not ask for it. The same thing is happening in Word, in Grammarly, and, strangely, in Scrivener, a program that has never had a line of AI in it.

We went looking for the actual switches. What follows is what we found, with a link to the source for each one. Where a source gives exact steps, we send you to it rather than retyping a menu path that will have moved by the time you read this. Where it does not, we tell you what the setting is and where it lives in general terms, and stop there. We would rather be accurate than complete.

Why is AI showing up in every writing tool?

Because every large software company is racing to ship it, and the fastest way to put it in front of people is to turn it on by default inside the apps they already use. Your document is not the point; the feature is the point. So the prompt appears on your blank page, and the job of removing it falls to you.

Writers noticed. In the forums we read while researching this post, the complaint that AI keeps creeping into tools nobody asked for sits near the top of the list, right behind the fear that our words are being used to train something. Those two worries are related but not the same, and it helps to separate them. Some of the settings below control what you see. Others control what a company is allowed to do with your text. We flag which is which as we go.

How do I turn off Gemini in Google Docs?

The “Help me write” prompt is Gemini, Google’s generator, surfacing inside Docs. Removing it is an account-level change rather than something you do document by document, and Google has moved the control more than once, which is why a support thread titled turn off Gemini Help me write in Google Docs exists at all. Rather than describe a click path that may be stale by October, we will point you at TechCrunch’s June 2026 walkthrough, which shows the current location step by step.

Two things worth knowing before you go. First, this is a “what you see” setting. Hiding the prompt tidies your page; it does not by itself change any data policy. Second, on the data question, Google’s own help page says it does not use Workspace data to train or improve the models behind Gemini (source). Personal accounts are a different case: if you share your activity with the Gemini chat app, those chats can be used for training (source). Docs and the Gemini app are separate products, and it pays to keep them separate in your head.

What is Word’s Connected Experiences setting really?

In late 2024 a screenshot went around showing a Word privacy setting called Connected Experiences, and a lot of writers read it as proof that Microsoft was training on their manuscripts. The Register covered the panic, and Microsoft answered it directly: the company said it does not use customer data from Microsoft 365 consumer or commercial apps to train large language models, and that Connected Experiences has been on by default since April 2019, long before any of this (BleepingComputer).

So what is it? It is the umbrella switch for features that send content to Microsoft in order to work at all. It lives in Word’s privacy settings rather than anywhere in the document, and both articles above describe where to look. Turning it off is a reasonable choice if you want a fully offline Word. Just know that, going by Microsoft’s own statement, you are switching off cloud features, not a training pipeline. This is a “what the app can do” setting, and by Microsoft’s account it was never a training one.

How do I stop Grammarly training on my writing?

This one is a data setting, and it defaults to yes. Grammarly’s own support page says the Product Improvement and Training control is on by default for individual accounts: Free, Premium, and single-user Pro. It is off by default only for Business, Education, and Enterprise plans. The same page says you can turn it off yourself at account.grammarly.com/security/privacy.

If you run Grammarly over a manuscript, that is a five-minute job worth doing today. It is also worth knowing the company’s recent record. In 2025 it launched a feature called Expert Review that attached real authors’ names to its feedback; a class action followed in March 2026 and the feature was disabled (Authors Guild, Decrypt). None of that makes the spellcheck dangerous. It means the defaults are set for the company’s benefit, not yours, and you should check them rather than assume.

Why does Scrivener show AI prompts when it has none?

Scrivener is the odd one out. Literature & Latte has said in plain terms that Scrivener contains no AI and sends none of your text to any server (their post). And yet, on a Mac, writers started seeing Apple’s Writing Tools appear inside their Scrivener projects, which is a disorienting thing to find in the one app you chose specifically to avoid this.

The explanation, from the same post, is that Apple Intelligence is a macOS feature, not a Scrivener one. It shows up in text fields across the system, and Scrivener’s editor is one of them. So the switch lives in your Mac’s own settings, not in Scrivener’s, and Literature & Latte’s post explains where to find it. Once the prompts are gone, nothing about Scrivener has changed. You have told the operating system to stop volunteering.

What does “off” mean in Inkling?

We built Inkling, so this is the section where we describe our own switch, and we will be as literal about it as we were about everyone else’s.

Inkling is not an AI tool. It is a desk for writers: a library, a character builder, a storyboard, a map maker, writing goals, and a Previously recap on every story. It has a generator, and the generator has one thing it does not do: it never writes a word of your story. Not a sentence, not a suggested next line, not a rewrite of your voice. When it is on, it summarizes what you wrote for the Previously recap so you can pick a story back up cold, and it draws covers and maps. That is the whole list.

Off is one toggle, in Setup. Off means nothing you write is read by the generator and nothing is generated: no recaps, no covers, no maps. Everything else keeps working exactly as before. And on or off, nothing you write is ever used to train any model, ours or anyone else’s. We wrote the long version, with exactly what is sent and when, in Your words stay yours, and the short version on our page about a writing app that doesn’t write for you.

We are not going to pretend that makes Inkling the only honest option. Scrivener is honest about this too, and its post above is a model of how to explain a confusing thing. What we wanted was a tool where “off” is a single switch you can find without a walkthrough, and where the thing you are switching off never touched your prose in the first place.

One last practical note

Everything above is accurate as of mid-September 2026, and the companies that own these settings change them without asking anyone. If the steps in a linked article no longer match what you see, the vendor’s support page and the community threads will usually be updated before we are. Check the source, flip the switch, and get back to the chapter.