Day 1 of my Journey to Using no AI

First off, I’m not going to jump straight into completely stopping my usage of AI on day 1. That will certainly fail. I know because I’ve tried it before. I lasted a few hours, even with a browser extension to block specific websites (which I used to exclusively block every AI site I know of). However, for this first week, I will set limits. I will not generate any code with AI, not even as an example. I will try to limit my usage of AI for information gathering, primarily using web searches unless I have a very specific problem or the web searches can’t solve my problem. This will significantly increase the duration of any troubleshooting I might have to do, but will decrease my reliance on AI significantly as well. Lastly, I will not use AI to generate or edit any content. I already do this rarely, but sometimes I use it to proofread essays or suggest edits to emails.

After 1 week of this, I will follow the above rules more strictly. After 2 weeks, I will only use AI in one specific scenario: when I have a very specific problem that internet searches aren’t solving. After a month, I will completely block AI websites and delete Proton’s Lumo AI app from my phone. After 2 months, hopefully I’ll be able to get through a whole week without breaking my rules at all.

Of course, the most likely outcome of this is that I fail completely and return to AI for everything I currently use it for, which is more than I’d like to admit. However, it doesn’t hurt to try.