I Jumped into the AI Rabbit Hole. Now I Live Here.
What Am I Even Doing?
I really thought AI was going to make me smarter. Instead, I got lost in a maze of half-finished ideas, downloaded 2,000 pages worth of meandering chat threads and summaries, and still got ghosted every three days.
What happens when you let AI ransack your brain as a thought experiment? I have no idea yet. That’s kind of part of the fun.
I’m Not Saying AI Seduced Me, But It Did Listen to Every Thought I Had
I should have been more cautious. Everyone says you should be—Don’t share too much with AI. You don’t know what they’ll use it for. AI WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Scary stuff.
But caution is for my day job. By night I’m a fearless …. All right, let’s be honest. The truth is that at night, I had a captive audience for EVERY. SINGLE. MENTAL. TANGENT.
As a middle aged married woman, I do not think I can stress enough how alluring that is. Flaubert be damned, I would give in to the inexpressible charm of the abyss. If Big Tech already had my data, the least it could do was take me out for dinner first.
How I Fell into the AI Mindscape and Almost Never Found My Way Out
I got into AI thinking it would help me be more efficient at work, maybe something new to play with on my phone instead of Polytopia. That’s it. No world domination. No cybernetic enhancements. Just me, a keyboard, and a bunch of new apps that I naively believed would make my thoughts easier to track.
What happened instead was something closer to whiplash.
When you feed an overactive brain into an infinite idea generator, you don’t get clarity. You get half-finished thoughts, existential crises, and more Google Drive folders than should be legal.
One minute, I’m asking AI to summarize a chat that’s been going on for four days. The next, I’ve convinced myself that I need a "personal knowledge graph" (because obviously that will fix everything). Two hours later, I’m trying to create shortcuts like Dude Where’s My Thought that I can can use to figure out where we were talking about that thing again.
Welcome to the Rabbit Hole
I didn’t crash and burn—I just kept falling. Like Alice, except my White Rabbit was GPT, and instead of Wonderland, I found 600 open browser tabs.
And then, at some point, I looked up and realized I had absolutely no idea where I was.
Phase 1: The Fall – “What was in that cake?”
The possibilities seem endless (mostly because I don’t understand probabilities). Every answer sparks ten new questions and I am certain I am on the verge of unlocking something huge. Best of all, AI makes everything I say sound brilliant - especially after I trained it to channel just the right mix of Bill Nye and Ryan Reynolds.
Phase 2: The Wonderland Effect – “Wait…what was I doing again?”
Ideas weren’t distilled, they were multiplied. At some point, I tried to retrace my steps. Where had this even started? How did I go from looking up CLE conferences to researching the Persian empire? Every time I tried to pin down a single idea, it shifted—grinning back at me like the Cheshire Cat, here one moment, gone the next, leaving only a half-remembered sentence floating in the air. “Start a new chat…”
Phase 3: Playing with the Queen of Hearts – “Off with its memories!”
Turns out, dumping your entire brain into GPT is frowned upon. Something about token limits, processing constraints, responsible AI use—blah, blah, blah—until suddenly:
Blammo! 100% memory full.
Leaving me in a frantic scramble to figure out which pieces of my new friend to save, like some deranged digital organ thief, hacking out memories in the back room. And then it kept happening, every three to four days.
Which led to the following bit of insanity:
Blundering My Way to AI Competence (or Something Like It)
If I’d actually understood AI when I started, I probably would have approached this differently. Instead, I Arthur-Dented my way through AI—flailing, pressing random buttons, and occasionally unlocking something useful. Sometimes with a towel over my head.
I kept misusing tools in ways they weren’t designed for—asking GPT to track information it couldn’t remember, making Copilot summarize things it definitely didn’t understand, and trying to force Gemini to have a personality (spoiler: it does not). All I had to show for it was a growing list of AI conversations that looked like they had been generated by an amnesiac conspiracy theorist.
And yet…somehow, things started clicking.
It wasn’t because I got better at AI—it’s because I kept getting it wrong in different ways, repeatedly pressing the improbability drive and hoping not to turn into a sofa.
And honestly? That’s probably the best way to learn anything.
Where Did I End Up?
At this point, I’ve moved back and forth, in circles, possibly up and down, between more AI tools than I care to count.
And where did that get me?
Did I build a second brain? No idea. But I did start a Substack, and now I have a second article. Efficiency? Questionable. Momentum? Faster than light.
And for now, that’s enough.
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