I am a Gen Z university student. The ChatGPT got boom when I was in 12th grade and I have been using ChatGPT, Gemini and Deepseek since then. I am starting to notice that now I cannot do searching anymore. I literally cannot do anything on my own like coding, learning something, fact checking, doing my assignments. I even become so reliant on it that I sometime even ask it what food should I eat, what exercises I should do. Sometimes, I “talk” with ChatGPT more than real human beings, maybe cuz I somehow end up having a bad experience or not so fulfilling experience with people. I have to use AI again and again for the same question, e.g., I asked a question today, I got the answer. If I encountered that question later again, I would not know the answer and have to go to AI for solution. What to do now? How to get out of this dependence on AI?
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Try to solve the problem/challenge without it. When you start feeling that hard part, that difficulty, make a note of it and dig into that and search for what knowledge you’re missing, some course, some chapter. Then repeat.
You have to do recovery work. In the past, students used to be “held back” to repeat courses or entire years. That was a good thing, they had to try again to get it right. Now, the educational system is afraid of doing such things, and it’s even afraid of giving failing grades, which means that you’re not getting that necessary feedback. So it’s on you now to give yourself the negative feedback, to evaluate yourself, and to try again. It sucks, I know.
Thinking, writing, coding, learning are skills. Something you need to practice.
Approach it like gym training: challenge yourself and slowly increase the load.
You’ll probably need to accept that you’re a lot worse at these cognitive tasks than you thought you are. That’s ok. There’s glory in failing and learning.
Approach it like gym training: challenge yourself and slowly increase the load.
What? I have a machine lift the weights for me.
That’s a great question. I tease, but first step is realising the problem and you’ve done that. Much harder is acting on it.
The truth is nobody really knows. It’s new. Addiction to it is also new as is the research showing its deleterious effects on the brain.
If I was looking for somewhere to start by trying to read a book a every week or two. Alternate between appealing fiction and an important topic. If you have readings set by your educational institution - do those instead. Reading and digesting plaintext information works a lot of your brain and doesn’t come with any immediate answers to questions, it will help you build your patience back.
Trying to do that and yeah, I want to read as much as I can before these techbros end up destroying all the books that we have right now.
Also, libraries. Local and school. Your librarians are information brokers. Their job is to find the shit you want and may not even be sure exists, but they’ll fuckin’ find it.
Even short novellas or whatever (Murderbot is crazy popular and they’re like 120 pages); length don’t count for shit, just read. Just get the momentum going, find a genre and/or author you like, read and keep at it.
Instead of asking, try to figure out what you think it will say first
If you’re right, look up the opposite.
If you’re wrong, find out why, and try to figure out what the reasoning is.
Eventually, don’t look it up. If you hear something and you know you’re right, trust it. If you have the slightest doubt, look up the opposite first. If the opposite of what you thought it was comes up, you’re probably right.
If it’s not the opposite of what you thought, you know you could be wrong. Sit with that. Try to figure out why you’re wrong before you check.
That is mindfulness. Remember to think before you search. Eventually, you will find out if you’re wrong, and in time you’ll know when you’re right most of the time without checking.
Then don’t trust it and check anyway. Fuck it, you have agency. You do whatever the fuck you want.
You have to go cold turkey. Delete the apps and bookmarks, delete your account. Do things manually even if it’s painful. Accept that sometimes you won’t get everything you want right away.
Also: disable AI from all websites, such as Google/DuckDuckGo and YouTube. Don’t know how to do this? What a perfect opportunity to practice old school Internet searching to find the answer!
I feel that too but sometimes I have tight deadlines, so I have to use AI. Luckily, I have started to double check the responses AI give to me and that gives me some satisfaction that I am getting my facts right.
If you don’t use an LLM, what happens? You miss a deadline? You get a lower grade?
If you do use an LLM, what happens? You get stupider.
Would you rather be stupid on paper, or actually stupid?
You don’t have to use AI. You are making that choice. It’s on you. Deadlines have always existed.
Sorry for parroting your reply. For some reason it didn’t load when I first opened this thread.
Everyone who went through this before the llms were available also had tight deadlines. Don’t give yourself excuses. You can do the work without them.
I am starting to notice that now I cannot do searching anymore. I literally cannot do anything on my own like coding, learning something, fact checking, doing my assignments.
This is partially not your fault, because we are all having AI shoved down our throats by the richest companies on Earth via marketing (including stealth marketing) and dark patterns.
You can’t even do a basic search anymore with being pushed towards a chat bot or directed to 15 different slop sites that were generated just a few months ago.
The Internet itself is in a dark place. AI has consumed it too.
Sometimes, I “talk” with ChatGPT more than real human beings, maybe cuz I somehow end up having a bad experience or not so fulfilling experience with people.
As bad as all of the other stuff is, this is the scariest part to me by far; you are de-socializing yourself at the time in your life when you will benefit the most from meeting people and forming lifelong relationships.
University is where you have some opportunities to meet real friends, date, have sex, and maybe even fall in love if you’re lucky. Whether they are your peers, professors, or just randoms, the people you meet in university can open doors for you later in life too. It only gets harder to meet people as an adult in your 30s and beyond (though it is still possible!), so you want to be taking advantage of being a university setting by doing other things, going out, having fun, introducing yourself to people, asking people out on dates, and so on. University is not all about studying, so you want to balance the social side with the academic side while you can.
But talking to people is a skill that takes practice. Just like how a skateboard can expect to fall down every once in a while, you should expect to have occasional bad/awkward interactions with people or embarrass yourself from time to time. We all do it. But the more you do it, the more you begin to develop the skill of talking to real people, and the better your interactions will become.
Instead, you’re talking to chat bots and learning only how to talk to chat bots. Your real social skills are atrophying while you embrace the cold escapism of talking to your computer. Maybe talking to AI will be an important skill in the future too, who knows… But certainly not at the expense of other life skills that are going to help you build lasting connections with other human beings…
One day we will all die. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to die alone with nothing more than memories talking to my computer. You’ve gotta touch grass, otherwise I fear your quality of life will suffer.
I have to use AI again and again for the same question, e.g., I asked a question today, I got the answer. If I encountered that question later again, I would not know the answer and have to go to AI for solution. What to do now? How to get out of this dependence on AI?
Stop asking questions and start using your head. Sit in silence with your thoughts and think.
Think about life. Think about your philosophy and what you value. Think about opportunity cost of doing one thing in stead of another thing. Think honestly about your own skills and knowledge. Think about what your life will look like in 10, 20, 30, 40 years. Think about your problematic addiction to AI. Think about what happens if/when society finds a way to actually test people again. Think!
You need to start looking inward for answers now, or else you’ll gonna be asking AI how to wipe your ass every day.
I feel scared from people sometimes. But yeah, there is something in them that makes them memorable. I have not a single memory of me talking to AI even though I almost use it daily. I have typed many deep things to it but AI responses are so bland that it is easily forgettable.
Social anxiety is a pretty common problem and some people really are pretty bad/weird/scary, so I can understand.
But there are a lot of good people out there too! It will take some time, practice and effort, but eventually you will find your people, and those people will become an actual part of your life. Figure out what you want your hobbies to be and actively try to meet people into those things.
If you feel that it’s really difficult for you, then I would suggest therapy. Social anxiety is treatable, often just by finding someone to talk with who can understand and listen to you without fear of judgement.
It’s a good sign that you at least recognize that your relationship with AI is a problem! It’s never too late to course correct in life, or build meaningful relationships.
I have been affected the most by the very people I loved the most but yeah I am thinking to be healed but feeling scared to have my heart broken again.
I know that feeling. My parents mistreated me. I was a people pleaser for a long time. I let people take advantage of me and I assumed they would support me in return. They did not.
I am still looking for a place where I feel at home. Maybe I’ll never find it, but I’ll never know if I don’t try.
When no one else was there for me, I did not turn to AI. I wrote my thoughts and feelings in a notebook. It’s a form of honest self reflection with no limitations; you can imbue personality into each word. Some pages contained neatly ordered sentences, others had just a few words angrily scratched into the paper. Throw some doodles in there, why not? The result is a physical log of you at a particular time in your life. You can reflect on it yourself, no external validation required.
Humanity is struggling under the weight of its own mistakes. It sounds like you are trying your best. Sometimes things are just bad. It’s not your fault. I wish you well.
Thank you
The Internet itself is in a dark place. AI has consumed it too.
I’m just leaving this here
When the virus was released, it infected 78.2% of the Net in a matter of months.[1] Net traffic came to a grinding halt, corporations lost billions as the stock market destabilized, huge amounts of data were corrupted, and countless military-grade artificial intelligences were unshackled and mutated into extremely dangerous entities.[3][5] NetWatch, unable to reverse the damage or neutralize the AIs, decided to create the Blackwall, a potent AI with the sole task of blocking off sections of the Net that had been overrun by rogue AIs
Go to the library.
It should take a while before AI starts replacing the content of real books.
But maybe it will happen eventually.
I went today. It was amazing
Start by limiting your technology usage. Want to know what to eat? Just go for a walk or drive. Want to learn something? Check out a book from the library. Get a physical notebook and write in that. Write your thoughts. Take notes for memory. Just practice every day. I personally don’t carry a phone around with me all the time. Going on a walk with just an mp3 player forces me to be alone with my thoughts and music.
Your brain is very plastic. If you can endure the discomfort of quitting AI cold turkey, you will start to lift out of your fog quickly. I went through a period of severe depression and heavy drug use that lasted so, so long. By the end, I could barely read 5 pages. Things improved and I started reading/writing again. My skills came back, and it didn’t take years. If you are like me, you can bounce back before 2026 is over. Read easy stuff, keep a journal, do simple coding projects - but use no AI. Your momentum will build fast.
Similar(ish) boat, but I never got as into as you, really sorry to hear that and really proud you are trying to get away from it. I used the very first version of ChatGPT to get through a very annoying CS class (yeah, it was a really bad class). I messed around with some small local models in Ollama, but eventually realized I was too dependent on technology as a whole. I was using DuckDuckGo to get answers to questions I should be working through myself and using AI to take notes I would never reference. So I actually started sitting down and reading the textbooks, Wikipedia, and carrying a physical notebook (yeah, I know, way old-school). I started downloading information in forms I knew was AI-free (like Wikiepdia from 2024), and working offline. Even went so far as to ditch my phone this semester. It ended up working really quite well for me. I started getting much better grades in some really hard classes like aerodynamics, and annoying entry-level classes like thermo. So, really, my suggestion boils down to, read. Read encyclopedias, textbooks, and documentation. phone, bad book good.
All the skills you loss at the AI are muscle. Start rebuilding them, it will be hard at first but if you don’t want to do it it will not work.
ChatGPT offer us with the sense of simplicity and truth but we know that 1- this simplicity have an enormous price, personal and environmental 2- the truth it advertised is a lie or at least a partial lie. If you don’t build the skill to see where it hallucinate it don’t matter if it give you false answers 20% of the time
I am more concerned especially since the book burning thing.
The book burning thing is just a public relations campaign by publishers because they are getting ready for another billion dollar lawsuit and they want the public’s approval.
There is no shortage of books we print like 10 billions of them every year, and the publishers and booksellers burn a lot more books themselves than AI labs ever will.
If your concern start at the books burning thing you’ll probably never stop using AI
We always knew that AI peddlers and grifters were authoritarian fucker, they will stop at nothing to feed data baby. The books thing is fucking infuriating but it was not surprising
But if you draw the line there and not at environmental disaster, displace poorer communities, wrecking galon upon galon of drinking water, lying to mangers so they wrecked workers protection and 401K market manipulation nothing will prove that AI is something you shouldn’t use
I know that text format is a bad way to convey a message and I probably read too much into your response but AI is a fucking disaster in the making. You don’t want to use it anymore so stop but it will be hard and grifter will continue to grift, waiting for their bail out
It is hard but I will try to completely be AI dependent. I am in software engineering so here everyone just run behind AI. Companies hire those people who know how to integrate AI. I used to be very pro-AI but I think that I was wrong.
Before I get to my actual point, a little background: The current LLM based “AI” industry is effectively a stack of cards with services sold at a loss to promote dependency. A lot of the companies are just barely backed by incredibly circular debt agreements. Unless someone actually manages to create the sort of self improving AI psuedo-god they all claim is coming, it is literally not financially possible for the current environment to continue forever.
That means that eventually, prices will catch up and the likely free or cheap LLM functionality can and will be suddenly ripped away. It will also force companies to eventually examine how much value they are actually getting out of AI vs the eventually enforced real sustainable costs.
It’s also worth noting that the current burst of AI tech (mostly just LLMs) is still very new. There’s an argument to be made that we’re in the dotcom boom, where everyone is convinced it’s the wave of the future but very few have concrete plans about how and where to best use it.
So even ignoring the apocalyptic speedrun of killing the planet to try and squeeze better performance out, we can reasonably assume that a full AI future with countless jobs displaced is not likely. Prices will eventually rise, free money printers will eventually jam, and eventually it will start to be seen as a tool rather than magic.
It is my personal opinion that this is the best case scenario that we can find reasonable evidence pointing towards. Maybe we all die from climate change first, but at that point you’ll have very different concerns.
Anyway, with that out of the way, I’ll get to my point after the line
I’m going to go a little against the grain here. Until the inevitable bust happens you likely will be expected to use AI to some degree in your job. Especially if you’re looking to do software engineering.
With that in mind, it makes sense to try and learn how to do it well. You don’t need to cut it out cold turkey, but you need to pull back and try to do things the hard way more often, and you need to stop and take time to think critically about how and when you do use it.
Don’t use it casually. Don’t use instead of more traditional web searching. Use it as a tool to search in natural language if you don’t know the specific terminology, and when it points you at a good source of information, you start building up your own knowledgebase.
Take your own notes. It’s been proven over and over again that the process of taking notes helps to cement the knowledge in your head.
Track your time. Deadlines have and will be present, always. Sometimes you won’t hit them. But if you practice planning you will get better at it over time. Then you can start planning how long you can afford to spin your wheels with any specific approach before you try a different one. One of those approaches can be AI, but it should never be your first one, and you should always strive to work through the problem and results yourself to ensure you fully understand it.
Any and all skills are like muscles. You can’t just wake up one morning and bike the tour de france. You practice. You’ll probably suck at first, but you can find ways to improve after each time. Eventually you’ll get better. Some skills won’t leave you even without regular practice, some will. But you’re never just completely incapable of doing something just because it’s hard to do now.
And some rambling asides: I dropped out of a Comp Sci degree, eventually found my way back to an IT help desk job, and worked my way up into Systems Admin/Engineering with a heavy focus on scripting automations and tools.
I had an almost five year gap between the last time I programmed and when I first started scripting things to make my help desk work easier. I remembered basics but I had to relearn a lot. I’m still relearning certain things like good organization of projects, properly psuedocoding and planning before starting to type out code, and splitting things into functions.
But it is possible. And I do occasionally use AI, but mostly to help point me at things I need to learn to fill gaps, or for assistance on the shape of a general approach to a problem I haven’t dealt with before (dependency resolution can be hell, and Microsoft doesn’t always make certain base level functionality with checking remote disk space straightforward).
For coding, try going back to square 1 or starting a new language from scratch. Like finding tutorials that start with building a “hello world” app and building it up from there. If you already had some coding skills before using AI, it should start coming back to you or at least be familiar.
I specifically ask it to answer in pseudo code only, to use ASD-STE1000 standard technical english, and to cite its sources for documentation. I try to use it for throwing ideas at a wall or if I get stuck on a bug. I find I don’t like using AI as a direct help in programming over the long term. Its like having someone else play a video game for you. Its not yours, and once its out of their context its not theirs either.
My advice would be try replace asking AI with asking a human some of the time, like you’re doing here. That’s a great start. Other examples :
- Try to do homework with a group of people, where you can ask them random questions
- Ask a librarian
- Join an online chat with a #random channel
The key is, when you talk to AI, that doesn’t build your relationship with another human or community, it all kind of goes to waste. So try to spend more time with communities and enjoy the benefits of contributing and building relationships.
Yeah, I am trying to find some good communities online. Back then, I have been in some really weird communities and listened to some weird influencers and that affected me negatively too.
Fuck online. Connect with real people in the real world.
I won’t
I feel that. Hopefully you find some chill people on the threadiverse!
Ignore everyone in here who implies there’s even a tiny extent to which this is your fault. It’s 100% not your fault. AI is far from the only difficulty your generation has had to deal with in your education. Things like Tiktok/shorts are also damaging. COVID set a ton of students back quite a lot. The school system is fucked in so many ways. And your devices all try to keep you from doing anything “advanced” with them in favor of prepackaged consumer experiences. It’s extremely unfair to expect students these days to just grin and bear it and somehow manage to retain their brain function and simultaneously eek out some measure of success in this world. And the trend has been toward the worse.
And yet, your only real option is to do the hard work to reclaim your own brain. But there’s good news. First: you’re in college. Congrats on that! That’s a huge accomplishment in itself! Second: your attention span isn’t so broken as to keep you from reading this far. Third: recognizing that there’s a problem and asking for help and advice is a hugely good sign that you’ve got enough level-headedness to improve your situation.
I think a lot of people have already said “stop using generative AI.” And I think that’s very much on track. I very much think you’re right in thinking that AI is probably the biggest source of the problems you’re describing. And most of the rest of what people are saying here is good advice. “Excercise it like a muscle.” “Engage with communities like this one.” Etc.
Honestly, a fair amount of what keeps me avoiding AI is resentment. I don’t know if that’ll work for you, but keep in mind what they did to you on purpose in service to their bottom line. It’s a lot easier to stay away from something if you don’t fall for the false sycophancy and you keep in mind the contempt the companies behind it have for you.
Find a hobby that you enjoy that takes a lot of “brains”. I write software a ton, but it definitely doesn’t have to be that. Yarncraft is surprisingly thinking-intensive. Games like sudoku. Puzzles. Woodworking. Bonus points if it’s something that gives you something to “show for it” when you’re done.
I’d go a little further, though. It might be good to also eschew as many addictive dopamine sort of things as possible. Tiktok, addictive games, etc. (There’s a lot of propaganda from #nofap weirdos out there claiming that porn is the worst thing you can do to your brain. I don’t think it’s that simple and I do think probably you’re the best one to make the call for yourself whether that’s the case for you. Maybe “detoxing” from porn for, say, a week at a time could be helpful from time to time, though. Also, I believe strongly that there’s nothing wrong specifically with masturbation or (safe) sex itself. (In fact, it’s probably better for you to do so than not to do so.) If there’s any truth to the #nofap stuff, I think it only applies to porn. And even then, I think that only applies to a minority.)
Consume more long-term educational content. Read books. Watch stuff that teaches you stuff. (I’m really into STEM stuff. Math, physics, engineering, hardware hacking, programming, etc. I also enjoy a lot of social commentary stuff, philosophy, and psychology. But do what works for you.) Opencourseware is a great resource.
Further still, I think meditation is a pretty big “cheat code”. It sucks. A lot. For a while. But it gets easier and I think it’ll improve your brain quickly in ways you can’t necessarily even anticipate now. Start with short sessions. 10 minutes, 5 minutes, or even 2 minutes. Here is a decent guide for beginners. Over time, you’ll start enjoying it.
Good luck! You’re doing good recognizing the problem and planning to take action to remediate it! And you’re more than welcome here. Post updates if you want!
I don’t like STEM much even though I am in this field. I also found LibreTexts to be good resource. They have the mission to promote open education
And this was when your pre-frontal cortex was almost baked.
You need a coach. Basically, self teach yourself for a bit and read long-form fiction.
