I am a Gen Z university student. The ChatGPT got boom when I was in 12th grade and I have been using ChatGPT, Gemini and Deepseek since then. I am starting to notice that now I cannot do searching anymore. I literally cannot do anything on my own like coding, learning something, fact checking, doing my assignments. I even become so reliant on it that I sometime even ask it what food should I eat, what exercises I should do. Sometimes, I "talk" with ChatGPT more than real human beings, maybe cuz I somehow end up having a bad experience or not so fulfilling experience with people. I have to use AI again and again for the same question, e.g., I asked a question today, I got the answer. If I encountered that question later again, I would not know the answer and have to go to AI for solution. What to do now? How to get out of this dependence on AI?

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[–] 6 points 2 days ago

Similar(ish) boat, but I never got as into as you, really sorry to hear that and really proud you are trying to get away from it. I used the very first version of ChatGPT to get through a very annoying CS class (yeah, it was a really bad class). I messed around with some small local models in Ollama, but eventually realized I was too dependent on technology as a whole. I was using DuckDuckGo to get answers to questions I should be working through myself and using AI to take notes I would never reference. So I actually started sitting down and reading the textbooks, Wikipedia, and carrying a physical notebook (yeah, I know, way old-school). I started downloading information in forms I knew was AI-free (like Wikiepdia from 2024), and working offline. Even went so far as to ditch my phone this semester. It ended up working really quite well for me. I started getting much better grades in some really hard classes like aerodynamics, and annoying entry-level classes like thermo. So, really, my suggestion boils down to, read. Read encyclopedias, textbooks, and documentation. phone, bad book good.

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