Hello,
This is my first post on Lemmy! Glad to join the Fediverse.
I’d like to ask for advice from people who might have tips on how to do research and learn things without using AI.
I’m starting to get sick of it, it’s very addictive, and I must have spent over €50 developing crap on Cursor.
When I discovered AI in 2023, I was the first person at my high school to discover ChatGPT. In fact, I’d even been playing around with the OpenAI Playground before that.
But over time, I became addicted, it turned into a real drug. I didn’t even use search engines anymore, just ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and so on…
Since I discovered this in high school, can you imagine what it’s like to discover this while you’re in the middle of a specialized digital studies program? Yeah, you don’t learn anything new, you gradually fall behind. I’ve lost some of my Python skills, like how to create classes and stuff like that, even though back in 2021 I built a client for downloading pirated games that I was pretty proud of. I’m really disappointed in myself about that.
Now, I’d like to relearn computer science, learn how to code, use Linux systems, and so on... but how? Not only have I regressed a bit, but what AI has really brought out in me is a reluctance to do things and a tendency to leave everything up to the AI.
Today I’m in college, and everyone uses it in graded group projects; no one follows the university’s guidelines, which require you to disclose when you’ve used AI. There is a climate of mistrust nowadays.
I’d love to hear your tips, how do you manage without AI, and how can I relearn to live without it? I’ve made up my mind: I don’t want to use it at all anymore, except as a translator (I use DeepL, which I don’t think is the same thing as a generative AI).
Yeah, it's exercise. Repetition and applying the learned information myself. I'll usually get books with some form of homework assignments at the end of each chapter. That's fairly common at least with programming books. I'll read the entire chapter. Sometimes two if I'm far away from my computer. After that I'll do some of the assignments. Or in case they're boring, cook up something myself.
Other than that, there's two options. Either I'm interested in some topic and enjoy learning more. In that case I don't even have to put in a lot of effort. I'd still have to do something with the information, otherwise it's gone after a few weeks, but it's not that hard. Plus I already got plenty ideas what to do with learned information once it's of interest to me. And if it's not... Well... learning Oracle SQL syntax or calculus were impossibly hard. I'll just need a lot of repetitions, compacting rounds, exercise, some test to see if I even got what I was supposed to understand... It's annoying and requires more willpower than I have available... But I'm not aware of any easy way to pull it off. I think it gets slightly better if you learn a lot/constantly. And everyone probably need to figure out which strategy works best for their own brain. Seems to be slightly different for different people.