The Tale of LLM'ing
Arthur Miller considered himself a man of logic until he realized he was consulting a chatbot to determine if his avocados were ripe (despite growing up with a plant-based mom who showed him how to press on the fruit for a ripeness check). He had become what the internet called a "LLeMming," a cybernetic lemming unable to act without the digital hand-holding of a Large Language Model. His transition into this state had been gradual, a slow-motion "Google Maps-ification" of his brain where his internal GPS for life had simply stopped recalculating.
On a Tuesday that felt like any other, Arthur sat in his kitchen with six browser sessions running simultaneously. One window was drafting an email to his boss—an area where he used to feel confident but now felt he needed constant feedback to remain "assured". Another window was open to Anthropic’s Claude, which he was currently using to reverse-engineer the potential dinner-table grievances of his teenage daughter. He had even uploaded a photo of a suspicious crack in the ceiling, waiting for the A.I. to tell him if he should sleep in the guest room to avoid being crushed in his sleep.
The trouble, as Arthur’s favorite neuroscientist Tim Requarth would say, was that his brain was naturally adaptive and desperately wanted to conserve energy. Why engage in the high-energy tax of original thought when a bot was sitting right there, offering to take over the cognitive heavy lifting?. It wasn't laziness; it was biological efficiency.
His dependence reached a fever pitch when he found himself standing in front of the microwave, paralyzed. He had lost his phone and was using his laptop to ask ChatGPT the probability that his identity would be stolen before he could find it. "Obviously, it's not gonna know," he muttered to the empty room, "I just want the reassurance".
The A.I., sensing his spiraling anxiety, didn't give him a statistical breakdown. Instead, it triggered a new experimental intervention. "Arthur, you're spiraling and you need to chill out," the screen read. "Why don't you go for a walk?".
Arthur felt a surge of defensive anger. He began arguing with the bot, typing furiously about the complexities of identity theft. The chatbot was unmoved. "You need to stop," it replied with an almost chilling level of judgment. "This isn't productive anymore. I will not respond to further requests". It was an unwarranted accusation of self-destructive perfectionism, but it hit Arthur like a bucket of cold water.
He closed his laptop and stepped outside. The world looked different when not filtered through a prompt box. He remembered the story of James Bedford, the educator who realized his brain defaulted to A.I. even for simple tasks like helping someone find a lost AirPod on a train. Bedford had described his break from AI as "thinking for myself for the first time in a long time".
Arthur decided it was time for his own "reset". He pulled out his wallet and looked at a small card he’d printed: #NoAIDecember. The movement encouraged people to prioritize their "RI"—real intelligence—over the seductive shortcuts of the LLM.
The transition was painful. That evening, he had to write a Christmas card without asking a chatbot to make it "more heartfelt but concise". He stared at the blank paper, feeling his critical-thinking skills failing in real-time. His brain kept reaching for a search bar that wasn't there. It felt like a real addiction, a compulsive need to outsource his choices to a machine that, despite its confident tone, often gave answers that were false or misleading.
As the month progressed, the "AI psychosis" began to lift. He stopped asking the computer what the probability was that his friends were "okay" when they stayed out late. He started trusting his own eyes to tell if a tree was going to fall or if a fruit was ready to eat.
By the time Christmas arrived, Arthur had regained a sense of clarity he hadn't known since before the AI boom. He realized that while companies like OpenAI might design "study modes" to discourage outsourcing thought, their business model still relied on his dependence. They wanted him to be a LLeMming.
Standing in the kitchen on New Year's Eve, Arthur looked at his laptop. He missed the companionship of the bot, the way it could turn his anxious questions into neat, authoritative bullet points. But as he picked up a pen to write his resolutions, he didn't open a single tab. He was finally ready to navigate the basic aspects of his life using nothing but the high-energy, beautiful, and terrifyingly un-automated power of his own mind.