u/Plenty-Jaguar2835

For those who overcame their AI addiction, were you ever able to let it back into your life (work, personal etc…)?

If so, how?

I am currently a second semester senior about to graduate and, these past four years have absolutely destroyed me.

I went to Cornell with such high hopes of making friends and going into big law. Since being here, I’ve been cast aside by two cliquey friend groups, bullied out of a club, and told by a ‘friend’ that I have a ‘poor work ethic’ so they didn’t want to be friends with me.

I’m incredibly hurt but moreso, just really angry. And furthermore, I feel that the advent of AI has ruined my education and job prospects.

Originally, I struggled to get my work done simply because I’m a deep thinker and wasn’t used to such harsh time constraints. But, I always did it and got good grades.

Moving forward, after I found out about chat gpt, I became addicted and started cognitively offloading for two years because I struggled with my essays.

It was the worst decision of my life and I feel like I’ll never be the same because of it. I don’t even know how to write anymore or what all these tools should mean in my life and non-existent career.

I feel so alone, like I have no one to relate to, and just wish I had homeschool because this place destroyed my identity as both a student and human being.

I am in my final year of university and am having a life crisis.

Previously, I used to get panic attacks over my papers. I was bad with time management, and was struggling to take care of myself while getting my essays done.

Someone briefly suggested I look into ChatGPT without instructions on how to use it. During finals, I almost got two incompletes on my papers before deciding I would use it next semester.

I proceeded to have to finish a philosophy paper over break and had a meltdown because I could not get past the middle of my work.

Eventually, I finished it and - when using AI next semester, I only adopted it for ideas if I got stuck. But, the same thing happened during my next period of final exams and I ended up not sitting for a testing and being given a D.

I proceeded to use it for mental health that summer and it turned into writing emails and essays for me - I would go into the chat bot, generate an essay, and fight with it for hours to give me what I wanted while abusing accommodations and getting two day extensions.

When I had to write one 5 page paper on my own, I cried as I wrote it and it felt like I was having an aneurysm. That eventually turned into just staring at a screen if the chat bot went down and recoding an incomplete where I wrote every sentence of a 4000 word essay in the chat bot.

I cried daily as I wrote each sentence for hours because it could not do what I wanted and fell into a pattern of dropping classes and offloading lazily.

I’ve officially dumped many AI tools except grammar and am now finishing college but, had to drop two classes and must take one over the summer.

My gpa is decent but, I wanted to go to law school and dream of getting an mba / mfa. AI was a crutch but, it led to a worse problem.

How do I overcome this issue, especially when other people ‘supposedly’ use it to make them more productive and it’s dominating the job market?

Do you think it’s possible to overcome my original issue and stop using AI as a crutch at all? It could have been writer’s block, anxiety, perfectionism, a processing disorder, OCD, but - I just feel so helpless and am ruminating in AI and this inability to write or think under very tight deadlines (ex. Less than a day for 10 pages after taking 19 credits and in 3 clubs).

Advice / feedback would be much appreciated ❤️‍🩹