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.
How many times are you going to ask this same fucking question dude?
Maybe he doesn’t realize Lemmy has infinite tokens…
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
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.
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 you want to get hooked on something without screen time but still have a kick from it try war gaming or pen and paper rpg. It’ll put your brain to work and it’s exciting enough to keep you away from screens. Maybe paint some minis.
Best of luck.
Addendum: go cold turkey on the ai, big tech is not your friend and never will be.
What about board games?
Oh sure, those are neat too. Whatever tickles your brain. Sometimes I like to write expanded rules upon classic board games. Just for fun.
Like let’s say the amazing labyrinth=> you get to play the cards you collect as special powers.
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!
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.
Post on no stupid questions instead of asking gpt. Like all AI - it can be replaced by asking a person a question
TLDR: People take longer to give you an answer than AI or a search engine, but they are way quicker at giving you the right one.
It’s way more efficient asking people. You get info from single discrete primary sources with real-world experience that you can interrogate, rather than a machine synthesizing an ‘average answer’ i.e mashing together a load of differing and conflicting info…
People are also better at updating your own question to make it more appropriate to the task at hand.
A public discussion also leaves the answer and context visible to others who are searching for solutions in future.
I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to use AI to find answers and advice, and online articles before that. 9 times out of 10 it just ends in confusion or the answers they give simply don’t work in my case. If I ask real people I pretty much always get the problem sorted eventually.
People are awesome.
I believe to keep your mind strong you have to stretch it. Meaning you have to do something difficult with it. That will vary by person. Thinking about elderly people doing word searches or similar puzzles versus someone in uni learning physics.
Is improv difficult for you? Is it a stretch? Do you feel mentally exhausted when you do it? Then probably a good activity. If it is something that you just enjoy and is fun, still do it for goodness sake but you might want to find something else to help rebuild what AI taketh away.
Code used to be that for me, but I get frustrated when I know I could just pop it into an LLM and take the thinking out of it. It is hard to do things the long way knowing there is a simpler way. I think we’re hardwired that way. Maybe I should move to Amish country and call it done.
You’re absolutey right!
You’re doing great though, that’ll be 3 tokens, kthxplsbai!
If I understand the question, you need to just stop using AI.
Start reading, non-fiction or fiction whichever grabs your attention more. Write your own emails. Use AI free search (noai.duckduckgo.com) to find the answers to your questions and read the articles. If you start small you can grow your mind. Investing in yourself takes effort. If you put in the effort, it becomes easier over time.
WHat about using Google with uBlock anti-AI filters?
Duck duck go with Ai assist turned off ran on Firefox. Screw Google.
i suggest not using google because its a privacy nightmare.
Alternatives are DuckDuckGo which is not entirely trustworthy because it uses Bing under the hood, same with ecosia.Startpake got recently kicked out of the default search engines for waterfox for a reason maybe privacy related? That one has google under the hood.
Now the ones i can reccomend:
searxng (if you have the ressources, its selfhost)
Qwant (no AI stuff, funded by the french for the french, free to use by all but the default in french shools and recently the european parliament in an effort to ditch google)I know that there are more options but i forgor…
Qwant actually has AI overview features, but they made it optional, giving you the option to deactivate the AI features.
maybe some of my addons block it because i havent noticed it but nice that you pointed that out
Is Ecosia good?
its basically bing with less ads and planting trees with part of the profit. You can test it out a bit and then test another or keep it. Search hopping is easy
The idea is to build skills navigating the internet to find information instead of taking whatever the AI suggestion throws at you. So, whatever accomplishes that.
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.
Another thought would be talking to people more. Ai emulates the edifice of human connection but doesnt have any depth or challenge- adding more social time would probably be helpful if you have folks you’d wanna spend the time with :)
If you dont, that might be a challenge worth taking on, social support is deeply important
I’d also say researching how people get over behavioral addictions would be helpful, as ai overusage feels like it has many addictive elements
Sending love, its hard to take the path you’re choosing but it’s worthwhile and I believe in you!
