Yesterday, we talked about social media addiction and haven’t even gotten over it; today, we’re dealing with an excessive and harmful use of AI tools in our daily lives.

When you can’t think, decide, and plan things without “asking ChatGPT”, you’re dealing with an addiction that will keep growing and going on and on over the years.

AI is a powerful and attractive tool.

Students are never to struggle anymore when it comes to school assignments, managers are never to be stressed about product roadmap anymore when it comes to brainstorming ideas, life hacks and tips aren’t hard to get anymore, articles don’t take hours anymore when it comes to using AI writing assistants, and so on.

It’s almost everywhere and every day that we’re dealing with it. It’s indeed solving a lot of problems and making us more … productive.

It almost looks like we can’t even call ourselves “productive” without AI, as if the words productivity and effectiveness are derivatives of Artificial Intelligence.

But the truth is:

AI is nothing without you

We wouldn’t have AI as we know it today without your data, without you. There would be no “impressive LLM” without using training data collected from your digital footprints and patterns. Why?

• Because it’s trained on your data

• Because it mimics your interactions

• Because it reads and generates things that reflect “what you might think, do, or like.”

• Because its architecture is all about mimicking your brain (not at 100% though)

• Because it improves based on your updates and feedback

It’s not the other way around; it’s AI following YOU.

Therefore,

AI should be your second brain, not the first one

This post is not about “quitting the use of AI”, but powerfully using it as an accelerator, as a fuel, as a second brain that should be used to make our brain better and not make it dumber.

a) Our brains are meant to be constantly working, thinking, creating, learning, improving, and building solutions.

b) Our brains are meant to be sources of original thoughts.

c) Our brains get lazy and impotent when there is a substitute.

If you’re always relying on AI to sort things out, you might be literally weakening your brain capacity, especially in an area where social media becomes the “primary source of truth and information “ (See "AI and Social Media downfall", from AI, by Kenn Kibadi).

Helpful tips to overcome the addiction

So then, what now? Here are some helpful tips:

1. AI tools now have a powerful feature called “web search” that works like a Google search built in. Use it for research, collecting information.

2. When using the search feature, make sure, in your prompts, if possible, they ALWAYS contain verifiable sources and data supporting the responses; this will allow double-checking and will help your brain develop critical thinking abilities.

3. When working on a project, be the one who comes up with the plan, the architecture, the skeleton, and iterate from there with the help of AI feedback (backed by sources as well).

4. Avoid giving all the action power in the hands of an AI — I think it’s still too early for that. Be the “human in the loop”.

5. Learn to document things with AI, to summarize, including links and sources. This will help you stay focused and continue learning.

6. Never stop reading books, articles, and learning new skills. Don’t let AI always read and learn for you. The less your brain learn, the weaker it will get.

7. Don’t trust everything AI gives you; it’s trained on massive datasets that do not always contain the truth.

Give it a try, but be cautious.