Rethinking My AI Usage
I was listening to a Vaush clip yesterday, and something he said must have resonated with me. He spoke about how our overreliance on AI to do the thinking for us ultimately gives us a kind of "limp." He compared it to an able-bodied person who relies on assistive technologies they don't really need, which, paradoxically, kind of cripples their ability to be able-bodied.
I didn't think too much through it, but I went through my Claude privacy settings and wiped SOOO much data. In fact – I didn't realize how much of my own stuff I've fed into the machine. At this point, other than my social security number, Anthropic probably knows just about everything about me. The optimist in me hopes that data isn't saved anywhere in the cloud. The pessimist in me knows that it probably is, but who knows, maybe Anthropic actually does delete your data after 30 days.
I'm not entirely sure where to go from here, but I do have a few general observations:
- Some sense of relief regarding not having to plug my every thought into the machine to optimize a better way to do something.
- More of a decisive, "here is what I'm going to use it for, instead" in this instance, basically work, filtering data from large spreadsheets, and things like that.
- A feeling of, "maybe I'll like, sit here, and just think about what I actually want to do, instead of just reactively plugging my brain into this thing."
It's been exactly one day, so this change, if we can even call it that, is super-new and hot-off-the-press. Regardless, I think more intentionality when it comes to this stuff is probably important. I will continue to use Claude for the annoying spreadsheets, but otherwise, for the time being, will try to divorce the personal side of myself from it, and see how that goes. For all we know, maybe for the past six months, it's actually been crippling me emotionally by providing me a steady stream of reassurances, instead of me just failing or finding things out the old fashioned way, by living.
Thanks for reading. <3