AI is everywhere. Whether we like it or not, the tech oligarchy has decided AI will be the way of the future, so chatbots have been bolted on to everything. The prince of ‘tech oligarchia,’ Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT), said about AI at a Y Combinator event:
“It’ll be running all the time, it’ll be looking at all your stuff…”
If I need to refill my prescriptions, I talk to a chatbot. If you want to order groceries online, there’s a chatbot there to pester me too. God forbid, if I try to google something, I don’t get search results, I get a page of Gemini summarizing what used to be multiple individual links to a half dozen websites. Hell, if Trump wants to bomb Iran, we now have AI to help with that. No matter where we turn, AI is there to help, or not.
A few months ago I decided, what the hell, what’s the harm, if I just embrace this new reality and go all in on leveraging AI. For three months I paid for Claude Pro and Google AI Plus. To round out my ‘AI stack,’ I also used Chinese-owned Deepseek, which is free. Anywhere a tool added AI functionality, I defaulted to using it in order to see for myself if it made my life tangibly better. I also integrated Claude into as many systems as I could via MCP and fed as much of my data as possible into Google Drive to have every note, picture, article, etc. all at the fingertips of Gemini.
Let me say it upfront: After 90 days, my life wasn’t ‘optimized,’ my productivity didn’t increase exponentially, and I didn’t learn Japanese or how to code. In the end, I couldn’t unplug from a device, I had become dependent on having AI with me at all times, and I felt a clear loss of creative and cognitive functionality.
It turns out I’m not alone. After researching the latest science behind the impact of AI on human cognition, I learned that what I experienced aligns with the experience of many other AI adopters.
This is Your Brain on AI
In full transparency, I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but all things considered I would describe myself a fairly sharp individual. I’m not going to win any ‘smartest fucking genius in the world’ awards but, very few of us would.
What initially surprised as I began using AI on a daily basis was how quickly I felt a cognitive decline. In situations where I would open a notebook and write down questions, draw a diagram, or process a thought or question, I began deferring to Gemini or Claude. The more I deferred to AI the more my thoughts became foggy, my mental sharpness dulled, and I began to feel mental strain when doing tasks that I would normally breeze through.
Turns out, an MIT Media Lab study, led by Nataliya Kosmyna, noticed the same behavior. In Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, 54 participants were divided into three groups and wrote SAT-style essays. One group was given ChatGPT to help with their writing, a second group was allowed to use Google search, and the third group had no technology.
After months of research tracking brain activity of each participant using an EEG the results were consistent to my experience.
For the group that was given ChatGPT 83% of participants were unable to recall content from their own essays.
The group also showed weaker brain connectivity, lower memory retention, and lack of ownership over their work. Interestingly, the effects lingered even after they stopped using AI.
In contrast, only 11% of the third “brain only” group struggled with recalling information from content of their own writing. In fairness, participants who started with ‘brain only’ work and later used AI experienced increased brain activity. The main lesson I learned firsthand, that the MIT Study affirms, is going immediately to AI as a first-response leads to cognitive decline as it becomes a mental crutch.
Just Another Brick in the AI Wall
Though a decline in cognitive function was the first sign I noticed, it wasn’t the only one. Soon after the decline in my thinking I noticed that my creativity also started to decline. Simple things like slide decks, article headers, and work reports stopped feeling like me.
I later learned what was happening wasn’t isolated to visual endeavors. That was just the symptom. The root issue was what researchers call “creativity illusion.” Let me explain, AI chatbots don’t actually create anything from their own intelligence. The ‘intelligence’ in the name Artificial Intelligence is quite deceptive. The reality is, AI output is purely the result of human creativity.
Every article, image, report, etc. we ask AI to ‘create’ it is actually using the mass amounts of data its been trained on to output the deliverable we prompted it to. Essentially, the more we use AI to create for us the more it pushes its outputs toward the convergence. In the end all of our AI generated stuff becomes the average of all human creativity. What’s worse, is the more homogenized AI generated content becomes the more we, the humans, experience a decline in creativity.
Dependency is the Point
My goal was not to test the AI adoption life for 90 days. 90 days of regular AI is how long it took for me to realize I was behaving like an addict. I stopped being able to sleep through the night. From 2:30-4:00ish am most nights I would wake up to have a random conversation with Claude. When Anthropic (owners of Claude) would send me notifications that I was getting close to my AI usage I would become irritable and nervous.
The final straw came standing by myself in the toilet paper aisle. I had my camera open and was asking Gemini which toilet paper was the best toilet paper based on quality and price. As other shoppers would come into the aisle to get the Charmin extra-soft or Cottonelle ultra-strong I could feel them looking at me. Truth be told, I felt bad for them, blindly buying toilet paper without running it by AI. Idiots!
Then, like a bolt of lightning, it hit me, I was the fucking idiot! I put my phone away grabbed a family pack of Quilted Northern and decided I was done with this shit (no pun intended).
I told my wife about all the ways AI was impacting me mentally and emotionally. Being the amazing human she is she was super empathetic. She then shared how she and the kids noticed how fixed to my phone I had become, how everything I said started with “I was talking Claude/Gemini/DeepSeek.” I shared how I wanted to cancel all the AI subscriptions and step away from tech so I could work through whatever the hell AI was doing to me.
It took months for me to feel like myself again. Since ending my subscriptions I’ve deleted all AI apps from my phone. I now carry a Field Notes and Pentel Energel with me everywhere I go. There are specific use cases where I’ll use AI due to work requirements, or for a specific task, but I limit my use to a computer. As much as I can, I track my events, to-do lists, projects, thoughts, ideas, generally anything I can on a piece of paper. If AI taught me anything its that I’m the only me and I refuse to give away my creativity and thinking to become a servant to AI.
Looking back, Altman got his way. AI was running all the time in my head siphoning as much of me as it could. In that sense, AI’s mission has been accomplished. We are bolting AI on to anything and everything to create the illusion of its omniscience and omnipresence. The end product though isn’t an all knowing intelligence. It’s an all encroaching tool, that cannibalizes our thinking and creativity by keeping us coming back to it more and more. The dependence is by design. Most of us just haven't put the phone down long enough to notice.