Alright, so some poor bastard over at Forbes, one of their “independent expert” types, apparently let ChatGPT rearrange the furniture in his skull. Title of his confession: “How ChatGPT Broke My Brain (And Why I Still Use It Every Day).” Sounds like a Tuesday morning for half the saps I know, minus the fancy AI part. Usually, it’s the cheap whiskey doing the brain-breaking, or a woman with eyes like cut glass. But this digital stuff? It’s a cleaner, quieter kind of demolition.
This fella, he says he was a “proponent of AI.” Most of us are proponents of something until it kicks us in the teeth. He found out the “biggest threat isn’t automation – it’s what I stop doing when I rely too heavily on machines.” No kidding. You stop walking, your legs turn to jelly. You stop thinking, your brain turns to… well, whatever mush these algorithms are serving up.
He talks about a stretch where he couldn’t even bang out a simple email without running to the digital nanny. “New tone. New angle. Just one more version.” Sounds familiar. Like a degenerate at the track, always one more race from the big score, or one more shot from figuring it all out. And the dopamine? “Instant. Novel. Addictive.” Yeah, dopamine’s a hell of a drug. I get mine from a bottle, he gets his from a prompt. Same itch, different flea.
He admits, “the more I used AI to write small things, the harder it became to write important things.” The man discovered that crutches make you forget how to walk. Groundbreaking stuff. His thinking got “fuzzier.” His “inner voice” went quiet. That inner voice, pal, that’s the only bastard worth listening to, even when he’s screaming at you at 3 AM. You let some machine muzzle him, you’re just a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Then he gets into the “Dopamine Loop of Prompting.” Calls it a “perfectly engineered cocktail of anticipation and novelty.” Sounds like a high-class whore, promising the world and leaving you with an empty wallet and a head full of static. For his “ADHD brain,” he says, ChatGPT is “catnip.” For my kind of brain, catnip comes in a fifth, usually. But I see the pattern. That low-effort chance to “avoid doing the hard, focused work.” Yeah, the world’s full of shortcuts. Most of them lead off a cliff. “Prompt → Output → Evaluate → Repeat.” Sounds like my last relationship.
And then comes the science bit: “Cognitive Offloading.” Fancy words for letting your brain go soft. “Relying on external systems to perform mental tasks we used to internalize.” Back in my day, we called that being lazy. Or maybe just too drunk to remember where you left your keys, so you just sat on the porch ’til morning. He says, “I wasn’t refining ideas – I was accumulating options. I wasn’t editing – I was evaluating. And eventually, I wasn’t writing – I was managing automated outputs.” Christ. Managing automated outputs. Sounds like a gig I had once, cleaning pigeon shit off statues. About as fulfilling, too. He even quotes research about how this digital dependence “reduces our ability to remember, process deeply, and engage analytically.” In short, it makes you stupid. But, you know, efficiently stupid.
My favorite part, though, is when he talks about his “best ideas” emerging while walking or talking, and how AI transcription tools felt like the answer. Until he got the transcript back. It “stripped the ‘ums,’ the tangents, the little asides to my kids mid-thought… but it also erased the texture that made the thinking mine.” Bingo. That’s the whole goddamn point. The mess is the magic. The ums, the ahs, the spilled beer on the manuscript, the cigarette burn on the page – that’s life, you sanitized son of a bitch. You don’t want a cleaned-up version. You want the grit. You want the blood and guts of the thought. He “lost hours trying to get the AI to un-help.” What a laugh. Trying to teach a machine to be human. Good luck with that. You’ll have better luck teaching a politician honesty.
But here’s the kicker, after all this digital flagellation: “I’m not anti-AI. Avoiding it is a recipe for irrelevance.” He still uses it. Daily. But now, with “structure, limits, and awareness,” like “high performers treat performance-enhancing tools.” Oh, you mean like those cyclists shooting up god-knows-what to win a race? So, it broke your brain, turned your thoughts to pudding, made you doubt your own voice, and your solution is to… keep using it, but responsibly? Like a reformed drunk who only has seventeen beers instead of twenty? Bless his cotton socks. I light another cigarette, thinking about that. The smoke curls up, like a question mark.
He’s got his “boundaries grounded in science” to “preserve cognitive clarity.” Good for him. My boundaries are usually grounded in how much cash is left in my pocket or whether the barman’s still serving. These aren’t just habits, he says, “they’re boundaries preserving the part of me no machine replicates.” That part, my friend, is called a soul, or whatever’s left of it after life’s had its way with you. And no algorithm is gonna replicate the taste of cheap bourbon on a lonely night, or the way a woman’s laugh can make you forget the rent is due, or the sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness of stringing words together when your head feels like a sack of broken glass.
Then he pivots to “The Real Risk for Leaders.” Because, of course, everything has to be about the goddamn “leaders.” The danger, he preaches, “isn’t AI replacing us – it’s AI eroding our capacity for deep, sustained human thinking.” Most leaders I’ve encountered couldn’t sustain a deep thought if it came with a handle and a free lunch. They’re too busy polishing their own halos. If AI makes them even more reliant on pre-packaged phrases and focus-grouped “wisdom,” well, that’s just Tuesday in the corridors of power. “Wrestling with ideas, navigating ambiguity, and staying with the slow burn of unfinished thought.” That’s just called being alive, you damn fool. It’s messy, it’s uncertain, and it sure as hell ain’t efficient. But it’s ours.
He ends by saying AI is “powerful” and “essential.” Maybe. So is a good liver, but we all do our best to abuse that. “If we don’t approach it with intention, it won’t just alter how we work. It will reshape how we think.” Damn right it will. It’ll sand off all the interesting edges, leaving a smooth, boring, predictable pebble where a beautifully jagged rock used to be. “That’s not a technical shift. It’s a leadership risk.” It’s a human risk, pal. It’s the risk of becoming a ghost in your own life, letting the machine whisper sweet nothings in your ear until you forget the sound of your own goddamn voice.
“We’re not at risk of being replaced by machines,” he concludes, “unless we stop doing the very things machines need from us.” And what is it they need from us? Our screw-ups? Our bad poetry? Our hangovers? No, they need our data, our prompts, our willingness to feed the beast. And in return, it offers to take the burden of thinking off our hands. What a bargain.
So this Forbes fella had his brain bent by ones and zeroes. He’s wrestling with it. Good for him. At least he’s feeling something. Most folks just swallow the blue pill and hum along to the algorithm. Me? I’ll stick to the old ways of scrambling my eggs. A bit of heartbreak, a lot of cheap booze, and the occasional flash of something that feels like truth, even if it burns on the way down. This digital stuff… it’s just too clean. Too easy. And nothing good ever came easy.
Time for another drink. This thinking is thirsty work.
Chinaski out. Probably for a refill.
Source: How ChatGPT Broke My Brain (And Why I Still Use It Every Day)