AI Dry July
AI deskilling is real. I'm going a month without it. 900 words, 4 minutes reading time.
For the last few years I’ve done a Sober October1 where I abstain from any alcohol for the entire month. I don’t drink much these days anyway, but a solid month of teetotaling abstinence is a nice reset button that turns something habitual into something I mindfully enjoy with friends and family.
I’ve developed a similar habitual relationship with AI. I reach for it thoughtlessly when I see an essay that’s a little longer than I want to read,2 or when I don’t feel like writing that cover letter for a manuscript,3 or when I want to avoid the mental strain of thinking hard about the architecture of whatever code I’m working on.4
AI deskilling is real. A couple weeks ago I was writing specific aims for a proposal with a few brilliant colleagues here in SDS, and I felt the constant urge to open up a Claude window. Just to write aims! In another setting, while in a coaching session with one of my CSTE Data Science Team Training teams last week, I opened Positron to demonstrate some fairly basic tidyr rectangling I’ve done hundreds of times, and couldn’t easily remember how to use the pivot_*() functions. It felt like coming back to a foreign language after a few years without using it.5 AI deskilling is real, and if you use these tools with any regularity you know it deep down.
Next month I’m doing an AI Dry July.6 I invite you to join me.
I’m going to resist using generative AI as much as possible for the whole month. With alcohol in Sober October the rule is easy —7 if it contains ethanol, I’m not having it. It’s a little more difficult with AI. You can’t do a web search or read a product without AI overviews. But generally, I’m not going to reach for ChatGPT or Claude for reading, writing, or for most coding problems.8 I’m teaching a new class this fall (Genomics Foundations for Data Scientists). I’m going to ask my students to struggle through some of the readings and assignments,9 so it’s only fair if I struggle through creating those assignments and course materials. I’m exhausted from reading AI slop in everything from academic literature to the New York Times to many of the blogs and newsletters I personally recommend, so it’s about time to stop compulsively reaching for AI to polish my own writing.10
I don’t really care that my mental arithmetic is terrible because of calculators, or that my navigation skills aren’t what they were back in the pre-GPS days of the 90s (the best decade). I want to avoid the habitual slide into offloading some part of nearly every cognitive task to the chatbot. At least for a month, to re-center myself and take stock of where the deskilling is creeping in.
I know I’ve written very positively about AI in this newsletter, in everything from writing code to peer review. And I’ll continue to do so. I’m neither an AI evangelical nor an AI doomer, and I’ll highlight problems where I see them. Even in 2026 it’s possible (gasp!) to have nuanced views. And I’m starting to think habitual and compulsive AI use is probably not that great for me over the long run.
We’ll see how this works out. I’ll write something at the end of the next month on how it went and what I took away from it.
TIL this is known as Ocsober in Australia, where the also have a Dry July. Others here in the U.S. do a Dry January, but where I live in Virginia we usually get at least one heavy snow in January that shuts down schools for a few days, where a Lord of the Rings marathon with a good bourbon is required.
Shamefully, I find myself doing this with real essays from real writers I know, clacking away on real keyboards with their real human fingers.
I went so far as to write a Claude skill that covers my tracks for writing I don’t want to do.
Last year I spent some time in Spain, Mexico, and Costa Rica, and could comfortably carry a 30 minute conversation with a local in Spanish about my family, our interests, why we’re going on this snake-infested hike, or where to get a good paella. Recently when trying to converse with a Salvadoran guy I hired to do some handiwork around my house, just a year later without much practice I struggled with getting basic concepts across. It’s not like riding a bike, and I’m afraid that neither are all the things we do with AI, unassisted.
Why July? Why not start now, June 1, as I’m writing this? It’s not just the rhyme. I’m teaching several workshops on AI-enhanced literature review and synthesis this month.
The em dash here and elsewhere in this newsletter reflects my stylistic preference and should not be interpreted as evidence of AI-assisted text generation.
I say most coding problems here because the place I’d have historically gone to ask questions, Stack Overflow, is dying a well-deserved death. I don’t write as much code these days as I used to, but I’m leaving myself a little wiggle room here.
Wish me luck. I’m looking forward to having undergraduates in the classroom with our masters students, and I plan to assign seminal primary research papers and “journal club”-like oral discussions for assessments. I have no idea how this will go with the 2026 cohort of students who haven’t experienced college (or part of high school) without ChatGPT.
I’m not the only one. Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick recently wrote about Choosing to Stay Human, and Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, recently wrote something similar in an op-ed at the New York Times.