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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

Cold turkey struggle club. Your brain has an ai shaped hole in it and you need to create new habits and routines to fill that hole

I’m going to give you an example, if you don’t understand. Thats ok. It’s normal not to understand things on the first parse:

"I just saw the odyssey, the main character is great. I don’t remember the actor’s name. He’s in batman or something. I don’t know. " At this point in the conversation everyone will either say “Matt Damon?” or take out their phones, then say “Matt Damon, but he wasn’t in batman, that’s Ben Affleck” “But yeah, he was great and I like the sounds the ships make when they are at sea, very authentic sounding. I had a good time seeing it.”

Here I will say, knowing the actor’s name has no bearing on the conversation at hand. So instead of looking something up we can just move forward with an irrelevant gap. This is what will cure you of your sickness. You are uncomfortable not knowing something, maybe you worry people will think you are stupid. In truth, it is smarter to admit you don’t have a complete understanding of the situation. Everyone in my example who took out their phones is also making a grave error. They equate their ability to reference IMDB’s cast list with “knowing” something. Stop looking everything up, reading does not equate to knowing - even when you are getting things from a reliable source.

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.

Step 1 is to delete the apps

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.

Step 1: get a library card. Step 2: read books. Lots of books. Do the exercises in the books, when appropriate (like for programming or math, for example), without help from the chatbots of course.

Sorry if I’m not of much help, but I’ve never been a mediocre senseless fuck. Sorry, again, if this sounds tactless but judging by the post and your other comments that’s the point you’re at now. Don’t despair, tho, you’re young and you can get out of it with a bit of effort, if you’re willing to put in the work, that is.

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.