Why I am Quitting ChatGPT: and Why You Should Too

Yes, I know it’s a clickbait title, but before you accuse me of being against progress, please read a little to understand what I’m trying to express.

For the purposes of this text, large language models and ChatGPT are used interchangeably.

Just One Quick Question

Try to answer and then read on.

What is the population of Poland?

Unless you are one of the thirty-six million people who live there, you might have a bit of a difficult time answering. Or maybe not. Because you have the internet, and just opening a new tab in whatever browser and typing it out gives you a response within microseconds. However, this means we do not spend time thinking about the answer. This observation certainly has been made before, access to technology shortens our attention spans and generally changes the way we interact with information. In fact, I have not even read the articles I linked; I just skimmed them to verify that they fit my narrative.

In recent years, humanity has created many powerful tools thanks to which we get quick and robust access to more information. However, this quick gain also causes to lose a skill:

• The most obvious example is pocket calculators. Nearly every device nowadays has one implemented in it, so none of us have to make errors when doing mental math. In fact, what used to be an occupation of a computer has fully been taken over by the machine, which was very fittingly given the same name.

• My favorite example is Google Maps. If I am in a new city without a guide (be it friends, family or a tour guide), I have to pay way more attention to where I am myself and end up remembering the topology a lot better. However, research shows that using maps in your phone has the same effect as having a guide by your side. Easy access to navigation makes it unnecessary to create a mental representation of the world. You always know whether the next step should be right or left. Funny consequence of this me rotating with my phone in middle of the street to see where the arrow points me. I am not used to looking at how the streets around look like to figure out where to go.

• Last one is tribute to my mom. She would always make fun of me, that I do not know how the alphabet goes. That is not because I have a disorder, or my mom is mean, but simply because my mom has studied languages at a university during times when online dictionaries were not a thing. Knowing the alphabet intuitively was super useful to speed up lookup in dictionaries. As a result, my mom is fast with answering questions like ‘whether p comes before s in the alphabet’ or not, while I have to recite the whole alphabet to get it right.

Now we looked at some previous tools and what they did to us. But now we have a new tool entering the game…

The Almighty

I am sure you tried it out yourself. It is so easy to talk to. You do not even need an account, just type chatgpt.com into your browser and voilà, you can start getting responses. What is more, it is integrated in just about every tool you can use nowadays. It is truly remarkable piece of technology, which condenses real-world knowledge in written form on demand. Some goes as far as to say it reaches the level of graduate students across all subjects. It is ready there for you 24/7 to solve any problem…

…and so I use it frequently in my life.

It is Monday evening. The deadline for my assignment is at midnight. I really cannot get this program to work. ‘Why is this not working?’ I keep asking myself. Finally, I copy paste the code into ChatGPT, asking for help. It points out an error in code. I fix them. Still not working. Another try. Still not. Then I try another model, Gemini from Google. I am going back and forth… Still cannot find the error…

Sounds familiar? This has become a common experience for me and my peers. Whenever I encounter a difficult problem, be it a mathematical exercise or picking a Christmas gift for people close to me, I turn to ChatGPT. This is especially true for my studies. You see, I study Computer Science and Mathematics: both very much full of symbol-based problems. And ChatGPT happens to be good at those. With a few clicks and no costs, I can unleash the power of 1.8 trillion parameters of thinking to get myself to the answer. This has changed the way I deal with problems in many ways:

• I am more lazy to struggle. As discussed above, at the moment I get stuck, I turn to a ChatGPT. I just generate and re-generate till it eventually works. I think it is very human of me to take the path of the least resistance, as my biology leads me to optimize for my current environment.

• I do not ask for help from people. Since it is so easy to solve problems ‘on my own’ (read ‘with the help of ChatGPT’) I do not expose my stupidity to other people. Not only does this further enhance impostor syndrome, it makes me less social! I think that is a pity, since solving problems together has helped me build many connections in my life.

• But most importantly… I feel like I do not think anymore. I was always proud to call myself ‘a goal driven person’, however, lately this has become a pitfall. Instead of creating mental representations that would help me answer difficult questions, I just go directly to the result. I take this shortcut using ChatGPT …

…and that is why I decided to quit.

The New Dawn

In the same way a child cries out for help to their parents, I would call out to help to ChatGPT whenever I had a problem. I had become a toothless child, not being able to handle anything on my own. You see, my main occupation is being a student. I wake up every day to learn. And with the omnipresence of ChatGPT, I was contributing more to training the model behind it, rather than learning new skills for myself. My relationship towards ChatGPT depends on my current experiences and might change rapidly in the upcoming year, but this is how I feel right now.

As I discussed before, with every tool we become more powerful, but at the same time we lose a part of our skills. I think that is okay, and there is no need to go against the tide of technology. However, as I tried to describe above, I feel like we are letting ChatGPT do reasoning for us.

And that is not good.

If nothing else, we want to keep our ability to reason under all circumstances. In a sense, this is the exact opposite of ‘critical thinking’ that has been so successfully marketed in education in the recent years. This technology is too powerful to be used without a clear sense of purpose behind its use. What I mean by this is acknowledging what the usage of the tool does to us, and changing our usage of it accordingly.

Are you working on something that does not matter to you? Maybe looking for a typo? Trying to just once use a programming library you have never seen before? In my opinion no problem, prompt ChatGPT until your fingers hurt and do not try to think. It is alright, tomorrow you won’t know what you did anyway.

But, are you working on something that is important to you? Creating that new revolutionary algorithm, writing up a blog post or maybe studying for a course at university. Maybe talk to ChatGPT, let it explain or suggest ideas, but do not let it generate the final product for you.

I strongly believe that taking hold of the reasoning process will pay off down the line. When you need to advance on the process you have done before, rewrite it, improve or adjust or even explain, you will have a better mental model of the problem. The examples that go for me are becoming better at solving mathematical problems, which only comes through solving problems, or learning to code better, which cannot be learned through just prompting ChatGPT but has to be done through the pain of doing it.

For now, I for myself disabled coding copilot when programming, and try to look up answers on other sources, rather than letting them be generated.

Unless maybe coding and solving Math problems are obsolete skills, the ones worth learning. But then we have a completely different discussion…

Final Remarks

The last two blogs I have released have brought me immense joy thanks to all the discussions they have sparked among my peers. If you read even a shortest bit, and you have an opinion, please do let me know! Stop me when you see me to chat, or shoot me a message in private. I am curious if you could find yourself in what I wrote, or maybe if you can call me out that I live in my bubble.

And Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Big shout out to my friend Ryan who has inspired me to make this change as well as keep writing blog posts.