Yes, this is true specifically for content scanning, we can’t allow the free plan to go unmonitored and become dominated by spam or illegal content.
All the other AI features on the free plan are optional. On a new free site, you can put this at the end of your https://example.discourse.group URL to quickly filter to a view that shows all of the relevant settings
/admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=any:ai_embeddings_semantic_quick_search_enabled|ai_embeddings_semantic_search_enabled|ai_embeddings_semantic_related_topics_enabled|ai_embeddings_enabled|ai_summarization_enabled|ai_ask_ai_enabled|ai_helper_enabled
It’s also worth noting that we host the models used by default, so your data isn’t being sent off to a third party AI company, it’s all processed on the same servers your content is already on.