Why?

This is the same as asking “What happens if I stop commuting to work in my car and running to work instead?”.

You will be using your body—legs, heart, and lungs etc everyday. You will get fitter over time.

Similarly, if you stop outsourcing cognitive effort to LLMs your brain will get stronger.

There are also other harms LLMs cause with sycophancy. It kills your social skills and causes psychosis. So your brain can recover from all that if you avoid generative AI.

I take it you haven’t stopped yet.

Brain plasticity?

Is it for day to day stuff or for structuring essays/writing code? If it’s the former, then you can probably expect feeling the cognitive weight of thinking/researching. 🤷

I’ll look for a resource, cuz idk off the top of my head, but some article did the math on a “Google search” vs the same inquiry using AI. Because the servers running AI are a lot more intense, a regular search consumed a few ounces of water vs AI was something like several gallons. I could be off, so lemme see what I can find.

And by consumed I meant used for cooling as the inquiry caused a spike in heat from the energy used.

Edit: https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/how-ai-affects-the-energy-demand-of-a-google-search/

Here’s one such article

Edit 2 a better chart. https://kanoppi.co/search-engines-vs-ai-energy-consumption-compared/

If you’ve been using AI for a while now you’ll have grown to depend on their convenience, effectiveness aside, the time saved on simple tasks makes them very appealing to just rely on

Once you stop using them you’ll notice how much time and effort goes into those simple tasks, even just writing a post and finding information on a subject takes minutes, you’ll notice it immediately and you’ll get withdrawal because of the friction in manual work

So keep in mind that you’re doing this to regain back agency over your life be it in information you gather or work you create and fight temptation to pick the easy way that chains you with dependency