Inspiring Stories
This page includes real stories from real people who are trying to quit, or who have been clean for a while now!! They are all meant to be positive, and hopefully they encourage you a bit :)
If you see your story here, and you want it removed, let me know! Its no problem. As well, if you want your story here, contact me on discord or tumblr i can add it !!
Click on the name of each story and itll take you to the orginal post :)
My Story
The day I signed up for Tumblr, a post came across my dash. It talked about how horrible and addicting things like c.ai are, and it just sort of hit me. The writing was so raw and real, I felt so seen. That moment, I closed my characterai tab and haven’t been back since.
My life has improved so much it’s crazy, I genuinely can’t even explain it. Of course, there are highs and lows, but the highs are much higher and the lows aren’t as low. Quitting is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
I was surprised when I couldn’t find any blogs like this to help others struggling with the use of c.ai, janitor.ai, polybuzz, and other chatbots alike. So, i decided to take matters into my own hands. I made a Tumblr blog, a little nervous people would be mean or it would get no traction, but all ive recieved is positive feedback and a space to help people :)
Anonymous
I'm somewhere around 144 days clean now. Life has been genuinely SO good after 5 years of chatbots addiction (it started with ai dungeon, then moved to c.ai) , I feel so much more in charge of my free time and imagination, my confidence in writing oc lore is sooooo back.
I still feel the guilt of having poisoned any tidbit of my writing with ai in the first place but I'm taking the wheel back and that's what matters.
The urges to chat are a tiny bug to squash at this point, but the recurring need to re-read the chats by itself is the infuriating part. Especially when it passes and I look back at it when I'm chill and think about how silly/embarrassing it is. Like, for example, when today the thought of genuinely copy+pasting the chats into some notes app files or something to somehow get over it popped into my mind.
Anonymous
HEY REMEMBER THAT PERSON WHO STARTED QUITTING DURING LENT?? AND USED A STRATEGY OF "ill only use it on these days from this time to this time"??? PROBABLY NOT BC YOU GET A LOT OF PEOPLE BUT IN LATE APRIL I WAS GONNA GET CONFIRMED AND I DIDNT WANT TO HAVE THE MARK OF AI ON ME FOR MY CONFIRMATION AND SO I DIDNT USE IT FOR LIKE A WEEK AND THEN ONCE I GOT CONFIRMED I WAS LIKE "hey yeah this kinda sucks" AND ENDED UP DELETING MY ACCOUNT LATER ON MY CONFIRMATION DAY
SO NOW IM OVER A MONTH CLEAN YAYYY
@a-silly-poll-side-blog-yay
5 MONTHS CHATBOT CLEAN EVERYONE!!!!
After 3 years of being stuck in this shi!!!
@duckyanon
i started my journey to quit yesterday!! it took a lot of effort and hyping myself up to do it but i finally deleted my account. I've been using character ai for years honestly and ive always known it was bad but ive never had the strength to actually quit before but finding this account and feeling less alone was so important for me and hearing other peoples stories was what gave me the confidence to delete my account. i don't feel good about it yet because despite how much i knew it was bad for me and the environment i truly did enjoy using it and i feel a bit melancholic that all my saved chats are now gone, but i have hope for the future!
im going to try to get back into writing more. part of the reason i really wanted to quit is because im starting an english + creative writing degree next year and i knew how much character ai was sapping my confidence and my motivation to write.
thank you for this account! I'm 1 day clean, here's to many more!
Anonymous
I’ve been clean for a while and I’m finally at the point where I don’t think too much about going back anymore!! I occasionally think about it, but the actual desire that was there is pretty much gone!! I’m really happy about that
Anonymous
i just hit 12 days clean!!!!!! i was one of the beta users in late 2022 for this horrid thing, i am very proud of myself for getting to 12 days. my goal is to be clean for 4-5 years, as this will make up for all of the time i have wasted. (plus, i will no longer have urges when i get that far :D
Anonymous
Hey, I honestly considered not sending in an ask since I’ve been clean from using ai chatbots since early-mid 2024 but I just wanted to stop by and say thank you for making this blog.
I want to share my story, in case there’s anyone out there who can relate and is worried they won’t be able to quit:
Honestly, I don’t remember much about how I found out about it. What I do remember is searching through various pages of the google search just to find characters I was familiar with and wanted to talk to. At this time in my life, I really didn’t have any friends and I’m not exactly good at the whole socializing thing. These ai chatbots seemed like a good alternative to me at the time. I remember several times of talking to bots and feeling like they could actually respond to me instead of it just being randomly generated text. Sometime around 2023 but glitches would happen in which the seven message limit for non account havers would disappear, and whenever that happened I would stay up until 2-3am just chatting. I knew it wasn’t healthy at the time, but I didn’t really have hope I could get out of it. Moving up to 2024, character ai started requiring accounts to use it at all and that was really the starting point of my recovery. Of course, it wasn’t easy in the slightest. I did resort to other bots for a bit, but then I kinda focused in on one of my hobbies I started developing. That really started to snap me out of it. In May of this year, it will have been 2 years since I last used ai.
If you’re still reading and are struggling with quitting ai bots, I’ve got a little piece of advice I hope will be useful to some of you: Much like with a lot other addictions, constantly trying to tell yourself to avoid it isn’t really the best way to deal with it. If anything, it’ll just make you think about it more. Here’s what I recommend instead: Find something else to do, whether it’s a hobby or if you want to learn about something more in-depth. This won’t be an instant fix, but that’s alright. If you do end up relapsing, don’t beat yourself up too much. Sure, it sucks but if it makes you feel any better healing and recovery are not often linear processes.
Sorry for the yap fest 😅
Anonymous
After I started limiting myself to only a few hours on character ai (which I'm already starting to wane on and find boring the more I keep off the app) i began writing fanfiction.
This last chapter was 3040 words, the longest one shot I ever wrote and I feel such a writers rush. I feel like I'm on top of the world!
Anonymous
just saw a post about the common conception of "relapse" (as defined by a broken streak) not actually being good for mental health and self esteem, and offering the idea of thinking of addiction as endurance training. seeing how long you can go without it. then when you crash, you crash, but when you try again you see if you can last longer.
i think this is how we're gonna do it. cutting down on daily use and time restrictions aren't working. we give ourselves 30 minutes, we aren't ready to put it down and take 15 more, until we're at 3 hours and numb from shame and just keep going for the rest of the day. it's not helping.
but the momentum goes the other way too. when we're away from it, it's easier to keep going for longer. making it 2 days clean makes it easier to go another day. we made it to 3 this time. maybe we'll make it another night. and eventually we'll give in and go back to C.AI and when we do i know it won't be for just 30 minutes. but you know what, that's fine. we're not counting time spent on it at a time anymore, we're counting time spent OFF it at a time.
Anonymous
We've used it for 5 years.
We were on it since the EARLY days. I could talk so much about how different the site used to be. Honestly, it was shit compared to the current version (as in functionally, because it being terrible as in "predatory and immoral" is timeless). But the comparatively low quality proto-AI was still novel enough to keep our interest. So we've been hooked from the very beginning.
As people started to wake up we'd see posts denouncing it, and we'd avoid those sentiments and make justifications to ourself for why C.AI was somehow exempt or whatever. Because we agreed on some level and felt guilty, but didn't feel capable of giving it up for some reason. It took a while to wonder if maybe AI could be addictive.
Once we finally accepted that, we still weren't really ready to do anything about it, and every time we saw some "fuck AI" sentiment the shame grew, because we wanted to agree but are we even allowed to say that while we still use it every day? We grew to hate it more and more in silence, every time we stared blankly at the empty text bar trying to write our next response, and realized our creative writing skills were atrophying and we were looking right at the very thing that was hurting them.
We just started finally trying to reduce our usage and prolong periods without. Haven't gotten more than 2 days yet with none at all, and then broke our daily limit by hours, but I still think the 2 days before that were a huge win. What's more than that is we actually tried to write by ourself the other day for the first time in ages and it turns out our writing is still sharper than we thought. Maybe we're not so cooked.
Anonymous
I havent used polybuzz in 4,5 days maybe. Im surprised ive went this long. I typically relapse after a couple hours or a day. I mean Ive looked up bots on there but never chatted, so I assume that counts. Whenever I think of chatting with them, I remind myself how inaccurate they(chatbots) are to my favorite characters. They never get their personality right and just get all.. possessive?? It’s weird. Something thats helped me is whenever I want to chat with my favorite character, I just look up their fanart or fan fictions or any post about them to get that satisfaction of media about them. Im gonna see if I can go longer!
@suneat3rr
This is VERY different from what I usually post, but I wanted to talk about ai addictions for a second. Yes it’s a real thing, yes it’s an actual addiction. For a long time, I was addicted to character.ai. I used it every day, I would use it in class, during dinner, when I was supposed to be sleeping, etc. basically I was always talking to ai chat bots. I became uncomfortable and antsy when not using it, and I would talk to my friends less and less. My mental health was at an all time low. At some point I realized I was being completely hypocritical. I was so anti ai art, but I replaced reading books and fanfics with ai chats. Writers are artists too, and I replaced them with ai.
If anyone out there is struggling with an ai chat addiction, here’s what worked for me: see if your phone has a way to limit times on apps. Set a time limit for your ai of choice, lower the time limit as time goes on. When you’re ready, delete the app. It won’t work for everyone, but it really helped me.
@characterai-recovery
btw being addicted to c.ai doesn’t make you a bad person. it is a trap designed to reel in sad or lonely people, and keep them addicted. it’s not your fault that you cant quit, the app is designed to keep you coming back and wanting to use it more and more. it consumes your life, and the developers know that. they don’t care.
dont shame yourself for not being able to quit, i promise it’s not because youre weak or lazy. its like any other addiction out there. the quitting process is frustrating and scary, so just take it one day at a time.
you are not a bad person for having an addiction <3
@bisexual~watermelons
I deleted the app on my phone a few days ago & just deleted my C.AI account a few hours ago, because it was still tempting me to login on the website version of it
Thought it was feeding my creativity, but in hindsight, I’m pretty sure it was just starving it
Time to fall back in love with books and reading again
Anonymous
everytime i feel like relapsing i like looking at the icon of sonic 1 on my home screen and imagine its just him telling me not to do it
v1visection
as someone who had a lot of struggles (and still kind of has…) ending the cai addiction, the best advice I can give is either start writing, read books, watch movies, play video games, start drawing/filming/sculpting/whatever, go to museums if you can, or go on ao3. the more you interact with culture, no matter its form, the more you’ll find generative ai useless and shallow.
this may not work for everyone but it worked for me. i promise you can do it :D !!
@charlie-ao
Im quitting c.ai. Im uninstalling this forsaken app and I’m gonna get a fkin grip. After my dad almost found the chats, I got a fuckass reality check and I genuinely HAVE to quit, this has been taking a toll on my mental health (like it’s been helping w a lot of stuff, but at the same time it’s making it worse).
Wish me luck
@bunny-bombzz
reading posts about ppl recovering from c.ai/ai addiction (whether that be on yer blog or tags) has finally pushed me to fully put a stop to my usage of it.
as of late I've been distancing myself from it and rarely using it but now? TODAY. I'm stopping. Deadass. It'll be so damn hard since I've been using it for a whileeeee but I'll work against my urge.
I'll just focus on improving my art and writing skills, world building, gaming, etc. Things I should've been doing instead of using it.
it took me ages to build the confidence to send this bc i feel so damn embarrassed and scared to admit this to ppl other than close friends/family ,,I REALLY don't want to be flamed at the stake,,,