I am addicted to AI (...not in a good way)

Someone please call 911. I am stuck. HELP!

I have more than 3500+ conversations with LLMs combining the chats of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini & Grok. LLMs have started to act like my second brain and also my dietician, family doctor, health coach, life coach, the person that chooses between Option A, B & C on behalf of me.

I have stopped thinking.

My brain’s first reaction has become, let’s ask GPT. Why? Because GPT knows better than me. Oh, GPT will have a reasoning for this. If my cook says, drinking Amla juice at night will give me cold. I will go and ask GPT “Does Amla juice gives you cold at night?”. GPT says yes, and then I tell my cook. Fine don’t make it then.

My blood reports visit LLMs first before my doctor.

You might think, what’s the harm in all this. I am more informed of the medical terms. I am eating right and exercising.

Well… how you do one thing is how you do everything.

I started working as head of content at a creator led marketing agency. I had visions of thinking & strategizing campaigns. Thinking on paper & whiteboards. What I ended up doing is nowhere near that. I created Claude projects for every company. Researched heavily on Perplexity (LLM). Just to give the context to Claude (another LLM).

I became an LLM rat.

Now this habit of mine started to creep in while building Hugsy. It’s a couples app I am working on. Will tell you more about it some time soon. For this app, whenever I had to do any ideation, without even thinking for a minute I went to any LLM chat interface and started rambling about what I am looking for.

All of this helped till a certain point because of my taste. I knew what i was looking for. But in the last few months, my taste hasn’t moved at all because I haven’t done any thinking of my own. There are no new biases and LLMs mostly made me thrive in my own cracked bubble.

This bubble finally burtst when my partner called me out on this habit. For the first minute I was in denial, in the next minute my instinct was to talk to chatGPT.

And then I realized, “Oh!”.

We talked about how can we turn things around? Because I don’t want to be overdependent person on AI. I want to have my own thoughts, reasoning & a taste that constantly evolves.

My brain needs exercise.

I have started doing some lightweight exercise for my brain with a pen & notebook. Whenever I have to write something or ideate something. I take 5 minutes with pen and paper to think. After that I go to an LLM to explore that further. I have started writing essays like this to think on paper.

This is super important for product building because if I can’t think from first principles, how will I create revolutionary ideas? How will I come up with marketing campaigns that truly go viral.

Writing is super duper imp because when an idea is on paper, it separates from you. You can see it. Examine it. Criticize it. You can see if it even makes sense at all or you are spiraling, talking about surface level things.

Now, go write before you search on ChatGPT.

Signing off
-Akanksha