Why I Avoided AI—And How I Finally Embraced It

As someone who writes about AI for a living, Rhea Purohit has a unique perspective on the challenges of incorporating these tools into our daily lives. In her inaugural piece for Learning Curve, a new monthly series on AI adoption, she explores the psychological barriers that have held her back from fully embracing AI tools—and how she's overcoming them. By breaking down her own hesitations and sharing concrete steps she's taking to integrate AI, Rhea offers a roadmap for anyone feeling left behind by the AI revolution. Her column will help you understand why even tech-savvy professionals can be slow to adopt new tools, and teach you practical strategies for overcoming your own AI anxiety.

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I write about AI for a living, but I struggle to use it myself.

Each time the thought of using AI to research and write crosses my mind, it’s followed by a quiet reluctance. It never seems like the right time, and I honestly don’t know if it’ll be worth the effort.

This paradox has been weighing me down for a while, so I went on a mission to understand why it exists. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

I struggle to use AI because I don’t like the uncertainty that comes with using a new technology. Once I realized that this paradox isn’t rooted in inauthenticity or incompetence, it freed me to find ways to change. And soon, I started running my own experiments with AI, like:

Using ChatGPT to teach myself philosophy
Fine-tuning a Spiral, a prompt builder that Every launched, to generate social media posts
Discovering meaningful ways to include Claude in my writing workflow

Being able to make sense of why I felt friction in integrating AI into my workflow is helping me get better at deriving value from it. If there’s a small, tinny voice at the back of your head, saying that you could be doing more with AI, perhaps my little epiphany can help you do the same.

Searching for the why

I started by thinking about what I do every day and how AI could help me with that. As a writer, I:

Read what other people have written
Think things through
Put one word in front of the other

Something I write about often are insights from AI & I, Every’s podcast about how smart, creative thinkers use AI. I spend hours every week listening to how they’ve integrated these tools to become better versions of themselves.

I’m acutely aware that LLMs can help me read, think, and write. AI carries the promise of doing great work in less time. It sounds like magic…but I still don’t use it as much as I should.

My hunch is that this is because I wrote for a living before AI became accessible. I know how to go from blank page to finished piece without using a LLM. I have workflows in place—reliable and efficient—to get the job done. They typically involve coffee, a Google document, a few stray research tabs, and many short walks. It’s familiar, comfortable, and—perhaps most importantly—I know it works.

AI, on the other hand, feels like work. It’s like hiring your first employee. Yes, they will eventually make your life easier, but there’s a lot to be done before that happens—you have to think about what you want to delegate, find the right candidate, and onboard them into your organization. Something similar happens when you start using AI. You have to figure out what parts of your workflow you want to automate, choose the right tool for the task, and iterate on the input you intend to give it.

And there’s the other thing: AI is an objectively new technology. We’re in the early days of experimenting with it, and right now, there is no one true way to use it. At least not yet. It has been known to generate different results depending on whether your prompt is in ALL caps, if you yell at it, and even what day of the week it is. There is emerging research on the best ways to use AI, but for the most part, it’s all up for grabs.

In other words:

You have to invest time and effort into experimenting with AI.
As you do this, you cannot be too attached to the outcome, because the result is uncertain.
When you add a deadline and the realities of adult life to this, it's a recipe for I’ll try [new AI tool] out next time, but for now, let me just get this done.

The allure of the familiar

Now that I’ve identified the source of my friction, the uncertainty that AI brings to my workflow, I want to go deeper. I’d like to think I’m open to trying new things, so why am I drawn to things that are familiar to me?

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