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).
Well, AI gan be a helpfull tool for some tasks in investigations in thousends of documents, astronomy, medicine, physics, etc. but certainly not for substituting the own intelligence, research, creativity or to create cat videos. You never can use AI in your research as is, without additional contrast the corresponding sources, it's not a toy for everyone, even if big corps include it recently almost everywhere, not to help you, but to spy on you and to train their own AIs with your inputs and data. You don't really need AI, the internet since decades works well without, even if you already have to research consulting several sources in your traditional web search, to learn to handle Photoshop or better, Gimp, Blender, Krita to create images, even if it cost somewhat more effort as writing a prompt, if you are online for some years it's also not so complicated to learn a second or third lenguage, even if it is only enough to communicate with others (Spanish, German and English (?) in my case) without the need of an translation tool (Deepl is proprietary and limited in the free version, Google, Bing are a no-go and OpenSource translations are crappy by default). It's always easy to avoid AI>a little effort and some common sense. There are things we need and things which are an artificial created need for the user, AI is the last one.