Cold turkey.
Read a fucking book.
Retrain yourself to be patient and not require immediate, bad answers in favor of good, but slower answers (by reading books, and not skipping to the end).
Understand that anything worth doing takes time.
Recognize that the effort you make to solve problems for yourself is itself valuable for the experience that you gain. Also recognize that if you do not understand the tools that you are using, your capabilities will always be limited by those tools.
Realize that the journey is just as important as the destination (if not more important).
Seconding reading.
When Reddit went through the API changes I successfully replaced Reddit doomscrolling with reading.
I have started to backslide on my Reddit addiction in 2025. Maybe I just need to read more.
I replaced Reddit scrolling with Lemmy scrolling. There isn’t as much content here, so I did add reading to the mix.
This also reduced the amount of time I spent writing comments on social media. That’s a great win, imo!
Post on no stupid questions instead of asking gpt. Like all AI - it can be replaced by asking a person a question
Sure, your question might be dunked on or joked with, but yeah, ask a person! /s
How rotted are we talking?
Like, are you aware you asked this exact question a week ago?
Best of luck finding a way through.
Try a boardgame club or cafe. Or contribute to a FOSS project.
If I understand the question, you need to just stop using AI.
How many times are you going to ask this same fucking question dude?
Maybe he doesn’t realize Lemmy has infinite tokens…
My understanding is that the reason the brain gets rotted by AI is because you do less thinking per question/problem, leading to your mind thinking less in general and getting used to that. So the solution should be to get your brain thinking more to readjust back to where it was (and beyond!).
A day or two ago in another thread someone posted these two daily brain teaser websites:
https://www.minutecryptic.com/
You could try replacing some time spent scrolling each day with solving these. Minutecryptic especially is requiring me to flex my mind in new ways.
A few months ago, there was a post about geting over ai addiction with improv. If that was you, and you are still using ai, improv isn’t the answer. Step one - delete your ai accounts.
You’re absolutey right!
You’re doing great though, that’ll be 3 tokens, kthxplsbai!
Personally, AI was the reason I couldn’t buy steam deck, so I just got really mad and stopped using it cold turkey… Amazing decision, been feeling great since… Still can’t get steam deck tho
read a book, it turns out once schools forbade social media, or thier phones for the most part thier reading remarkablly improved. writing/ math is another matter.
if you are taking notes in school, dont do it with a laptop, its very distracting. Also AI tends to not be very useful info in that they dont gather it from reputable sources most of the time, they often summarize reddit posts/blogs and opinion pieces.
came to say the traditional way of expanding ones mental ability is to read.
Depends on what you’re using it for?
Advice might be dependent on what you use it for at the moment.
So what do you use it for at the moment?
Coming into summer is a great time to cut it out of your life, so off to a good start.
Or you could pivot to using it for useful things. I don’t think it’s useless, you can use it to learn programming and stuff.
I’ll speak directly to the last question: if you use AI as a means to generate ‘creative’ output (see: ideas on various topics/themes stolen from other folks), improv will likely help with learning to think on your feet and confidence in expressing yourself with reference just to the electrical impulses in your own noggin.
But I don’t think that alone is sufficient to fix a truly ‘AI-rotted brain’, which I take to mean a mind that reaches for easy answers and shortcuts. That’s a bigger project, and there’s a lot of good comments here and on your other post in that vein.
I don’t know your IRL circumstances, but a project idea for you: take a walk around the place you live with a notepad. Write down every question you have about any old stuff that catches your fancy/strikes you as weird (probably a good idea to take pictures too). Try and find the answers to those questions without using AI - instead, talk to a librarian, send an email to your local historical society, etc. etc. Ask for resources about the topic in question. Bonus points if you take that info and make something creative with it - a poem, a short story about someone contemporary to the thing you’re curious about, one act play, interpretive dance, whatever.
Like this for you simply because, depending on where you live and what catches your fancy, there may not be that much info fed into an AI database, but there could totally be a book/collection in an archive/knowledgeable person who’d be happy to chat about it.
Realize that AI will not actually do everything you think it would. Because it can’t. You still need to put effort in some things.
Started improv a few years ago. Very good for my mental health.
Are there any free online improv classes?
So much better to do it in person.
