When ChatGPT first became mainstream, I was wary that it could be anything more than an alternative to Google searching. Peer pressure set in quickly, promising to ease everything from everyday tasks to my professional work. I admit, I got caught up in the allure of it all. I set out to experiment with ChatGPT and Claude with the goal of using them as both my personal assistant and personal law clerk. I knew that AI made mistakes sometimes, but don’t we all? That’s what I was for, as editor-in-chief of my new team of assistants.

The results were incredible. I had Claude create a personalized marathon training plan for me. I had ChatGPT look over my redacted work notes and give me issues that I should look into. I even bounced ideas on how to improve my personal productivity and planning system. It all seemed to be better than I ever could have imagined without AI.

Today, I am not using AI at all, save for the ubiquitous summarized search results produced by AI. Here are the lessons I learned during my AI experiment:

  1. It created more work. For all of the quick output AI fed me, the amount of time I spent fixing it’s mistakes, or trying to get it to fix it’s own mistakes, was not worth it. Generic writing that needed to be cleaned up, hallucinated legal citations that needed to be verified, answers that were given to satisfy my prompt instead of an honest answer, the list goes on and on. I spent more time editing AI’s outputs than if I had just done the work myself, and the edited quality was worse because of the starting point.

  2. It’s an addictive distraction. Like any other new technology, we need to step back and ask ourselves why and how we are using it. I found my use of AI akin to social media, filled with the infinite follow-up questions and designed environment that keeps you engaged. Using the Digital Minimalism framework, I asked myself if this directly supports something I deeply value? Sure, in theory it could. Is it the best way to support that value? Definitely not. As I outlined in the earlier, doing the work without the use of AI resulted in better quality.

  3. It’s a solution to a problem I did not have. I love writing, reading, and thinking through issues. The promises of AI to do these things for me strip away part of what makes my life enjoyable. Plus, why replace things like cognitive functioning, community building, and analog activity to do a few things more efficiently?

There are many more reasons why I think it is best to be wary of AI use, but I will save those for another day. For now, I want to be a human doing human things, and AI does not fit into that equation.