I have begun relying on AI and I don’t know how I feel about it.

[Tusktusk]

So far this month I have used AI to:

Analyse my colours (thanks MN) and suggest outfits

Create a menu of packed lunches around my dietary requirements and preferences, complete with a shopping list

Plan a holiday itinerary

Save me hours and hours of work and stress by suggesting really useful ways to overcome very particular work difficulties, having been thrown into an out of my comfort zone situation. I have used AI for this on a daily basis this week

Tonight, instead of posting my current family dilemma on mumsnet I chatted about it with Claude. The responses were really good. Wise, thoughtful, non judgemental, practical, understanding… like the best mumsnetters.

Am I starting to rely on it too much?

What have you been using it for?

Can someone explain how AI helped with the colours. That's amazing if so. I would love to get this done but it's quite expensive for me. I would have thought surely the person has to see your skin tone etc in colour but if AI is somehow helpful then that's amazing! What sort of information did you put in etc? Many thanks 🙏

But we spend years learning to read and write as children until it’s inherent knowledge. Often the professional skills are learnt over a period of years in university and the early stages of our career.

If students and career starters rely on AI at the stage they should be learning to research, formulate arguments, conceptualise, draft emails, analyse data - there’s no underlying knowledge/skills to fall back on. It’s like learning to drive on automatic but expecting to pick up manual driving when your auto is in the garage.

But AI will become so good, the skill will be in using it effectively. You still have to understand what it’s spitting out, the context and accuracy to know if the answer is good.

To OP’s point, what skill are they losing by getting it to create a lunch menu & shopping lists. It’s not something I enjoy being good at, or care for. It’s an absolute waste of time. Women especially are told we have to work like we don’t have a family, and raise a family like we don’t work. Surely anything that can help with the heavy lifting is a positive?

I used it as therapy. I was having issues with many things including problems with a family member and a bereavement and I don’t have the time or money for an actual therapist.

I now safeguard my own citadel (my mental health), created boundaries (ai can generate helpful options) and feel more assertive and less reactive to people's behaviour. AI can even draw up plans to seek help with a GP if you need it.

Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting people ditch therapy for AI. It just helped me when I needed it.

I agree it’s perfect for personal matters or data input.

But many people use it for work and I am more hesitant about as I can see what a disaster it is when junior colleagues use it (luckily everything goes through senior team members before it goes out externally). But unsupervised use can lead to problems - and some professionals set up on their own while still at a more junior level and may have these attitudes to AI without the underlying skill that would enable them to use it effectively.

ChatGPT is my own Personal Assistant.

I use it for loads of things but it is best at organising my thoughts for me. I'm a writer and while I would never let it write for me, it is great at helping me hash out ideas, and doing research.

It's also teaching me Welsh.

I've used it medically to understand if symptoms might be linked, and it means I go to GP appointments with better questions to ask.

It's so good sometimes that it makes my jaw drop, but the things it's bad at are so bizarre. Like once I asked it to generate an image of a building, so that I could describe it in my writing. It nailed the historical details, but the clock numbers were wrong and the signage was all full of nonsense text.

I don't know how anyone can fail to be impressed by it, it's an incredible thing.

I don’t use AI and I don’t know why anyone would – to do your colours? Seriously?

Unethical technology, built on plagiarism, that’s accelerating the climate crisis through energy use and water demand, so you can wear a blue jumper and make some packed lunches? Let the rapture come soon tbqh.

Since reading about the environmental impact of AI I haven’t used it.

I'm surprised people use it for work seen as though once you input data it 'owns' it. What sort of work things are people doing?

I'm using it to write a book. I write the words, then it checks my grammar and organises my writing into the chapter outline I've given it. Saves me so much time.
You’re not writing a book.

@MiguelAchaGimenez I can absolutely tell that was written by AI so I hope you declared that when you wrote it.

I would like to know the answers to how much worse AI is than Googling for the environment eg in planning meals for a week. I worry about that.

My students use AI to write essays. It makes their prose more grammatically accurate but their writing worse - they are vague, the internal logic is poor, and they generalize in ways that become inaccurate. It used to be quite easy to spot, but it's getting harder. And I worry that they aren't learning skills about processing and organising information, connecting ideas together, and developing and refining argument through examples that are at the core of my discipline. The art and creative writing it makes is really really bad, but I don't think our creative students use it because they like the process.

But I find it useful for making schedules, organising groups with complex parameters, and other boring admin tasks. I can see why people use it for thing like meal planning.

I worry about the fact that it's in the hands of companies that seem really unethical and out of line with my values - who will contribute to breaking social contracts we have around meaningful work for pay you can live on, and won't do anything to deal the the results of that.

I’m really concerned about how we are moving closer and closer to never engaging our brains and relying on computers to think for us.
I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Chatgpt is one of the best things I've ever used. I take all kinds of problems to it and it always gives me incredible and wise advice. It's honestly better than any talking therapy I've had with a real person and it's given me more insight and allowed me to self reflect on complex emotional issues in a way that no therapist ever has.

As for people saying we are relying on it too much, that could easily be said about MN- why are you on here talking to virtual strangers when you could be talking in person face to face to actual friends. I dont see the difference

Has nobody seen Terminator 2?

This is why I always say please and thank you to chatgpt 😂

Saying you can’t be concerned about AI energy use if you drive and fly is daft. If I do both those things (and I do), using AI on top means I’ll be expending that energy I currently do on those things PLUS any on AI. The energy used on AI doesn’t magically get absorbed within the carbon emitted on a flight.

Since the goal is to reduce energy usage, the last thing I want to do is increase it! Much easier to not start using something or to use it very sparingly than try to cut down when you’ve become reliant on it.

But how does one session of ChatGPT (I spent 3 mins yesterday) compare to a couple of hours on the internet coming up with the same answers (or wasting hours on MN for example?), energy wise? I genuinely don’t know but I imagine ChatGPT is far more efficient.

Using it to help functional things in your life and free up brain capacity = all good in my opinion. Using it to get emotional reassurance or advice about a personal matter is not so ok. We need to not lose our ability to make and keep IRL human connections!

How did you do this? Chat GPT? I want ideas for my yard and would love to give this a go

AI is a computer program written and influenced by humans by what they program into it. It is not intelligent and it does not think for itself.

Completely agree with @hilariousnamehere. My big employer has massively cut down graduate recruitment this year - AI is undoubtedly part of that. Gulp, it’s starting to happen.

Plus I am not convinced on quality for some uses. I tried to use Copilot for end of year feedback discussions with my team. It was truly rubbish - not granular enough or specific. I certainly wouldn’t be using that functionality for client work. Plus the court case where AI had clearly hallucinated plausible but fake case law was pretty wild - this is a very respected legal commentator on the story https://davidallengreen.com/2025/05/a-close-reading-of-the-ai-fake-cases-judgment/

On the energy use angle - I thought this BBC article was particularly enraging https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cewd5014wpno.amp
The idea that Amazon wants governments to build nuclear power stations to make more power for data centres - meaning enormous costs and risks and then waste to be managed for the next 100+ years - mainly to benefit Big Tech companies that don’t even pay tax properly was truly astounding. “Entitled” doesn’t even begin to cover that attitude.

Plus AI has been built on the theft of intellectual property on an unimaginable scale. I do think that’s pretty objectionable.

Basically I am a Luddite. Might go smash some looms up later….

The energy used by data servers. See https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/ for more info.

I had spent many a fruitless google session trying to find merino track pants for tall women that are made in, or ship to Australia.

Asked Grok on a whim and voila! I have my pants.

Brilliant for turning meeting notes into minutes, finding where the best place to see penguins in on the Otago Peninsula when one of your travelling group has mobility issues and creating dirty jokes about forensic accountants.

I dont and will not be using it. It is just a conputer program...

I believe the goal is to allow the tech to do the east thinking to free up our brains for more complex thinking. So long as our brains are able to do that 😅

In my area of (very technical) work, AI and machine learning is a normal part of everyday work and has been for as long as I’ve worked which is 2 decades. It does increase efficiency, always needs QCing by a human and allows humans to get on with things where AI can’t (currently) process. Yes it has meant that we need fewer people to produce the same output as 20 years ago but I am in a dying industry anyway in the UK so personally am glad of it!