Chat-GPT Detox

Prior to the Autumn of 2022, I heard about Chat-GPT and how some of my friends got private access into the tool. Back then I did not bat an eye, though I heard them that it's a good tool that quickly process data. I honestly did not care much until I heard that a friend of mine uses it for some of his daily chores.

I began using it right in the winter of 2023 when I had to rush something up, what I had was not perfect, it had some mistakes, which made me question its contraptions. After doing some reaserch, I learned that I came a bit late to the party. Right after it became a public tool, it was good, probably it worsen'd due to it adapting to humans on a global scope, though it surprises me that it became bad at statistics of all things, a science where most of what you would need is to apply formulas and make interpretations.

In almost every hall at the university, pretty much everyone had a Chat-GPT tab. Some professors were okey with it and said: Hey just use it for research. I think most of the students that I questioned used it for text generation, while some stated that they used it to generate facts. As for me ? I use it for debugging my code most of the time.

Funnily enough, I saw people holding seminars on how to properly write prompts for the tool. Maybe I am biased here but I believe these were stupid so to speak.

Later on they announced GPT 4.0, an upgrade to the public tool that we used. It made me question if wether the company behind the tool secretly downgraded it to promot the former.

As time moved on and as I kept using it for some of my needs, I slowly noticed a big change in my life: Not only I started prioritizing using it over Googling, since it was faster at determining what I asked for, but I also noticed a gradual change in my patience vs. pretty much everything. It was the latter point that motivated me into considering this detox sort of thing.

I slowly started to lessen its usage every day. Not only it helped with recovering my patience, but also it amplified the learning effect, I may believe that it also improved my googling search querries. After a couple of weeks, I noticed my history containing no traces of the site, though my productivity has been reduced.

Here is an even bigger question: Was this detox really necessary ? should one really stop using Chat-GPT ?

How would our lives look like if these AI tools never existed ? In all honesty, it depends on your purpose: What do you want from this tool ?
I think using AI for generative purposes has a negative effect on the learning process. I know it can be fast at handling requests, but at the end of the day, it becomes less fun the more you use it, especially if you love what you are doing. It's a double sided edge, I do however sympathise that the current economy and the current world we live in calls for its usage; we have an illusive need to solve problems ASAP. Despite this, I still believe that these tools wrecked the psyche of our society. It poisoned us in a way that makes us depend on it the more we use it. Analog to what I said is when I noticed some students counting basic 2 digits addition in a calculator.

Today, I still use Chat-GPT, but only to give it headache labour, like giving it a huge wall of text and asking it to remove commas and put every element in an ordered list. In some rare occasions I would use it as a last option teacher in case I spend hours trying to comprehend a gimmick. My takeaway is, use it but be careful.