Just one year ago, I urged you to dive into artificial intelligence (AI) and explore how it could make your summer more enjoyable by planning vacations, proposing new recipes, organizing your projects, and more. While I remain enthusiastic about its extraordinary potential, the possible risks of AI are now emerging more clearly.
Just as the automobile rapidly transformed human mobility, it took years to understand and add the appropriate precautions and safety measures. Seat belts, traffic signals, speed limits, and driver education became lifesaving improvements. AI is rolling out far more rapidly and pervasively, and without caution, it will carry a very high price in terms of our mental and intellectual health.
Increasingly, parents, teachers, employers, researchers, and mental health professionals are asking whether people can overuse or even become addicted to AI.
AI addiction is not currently a formal psychiatric diagnosis, and the research is still beginning. Yet the risk is real. AI addiction would involve excessive or compulsive use that continues despite negative consequences. The user may or may not recognize that the behavior is interfering with his or her sleep, school, work, relationships, or emotional health. He or she may try to reduce their AI use and find that they are unable.
The addiction is not to AI itself in the way someone becomes dependent on a drug. It is an addiction to the experience AI provides: speed, stimulation, validation, novelty, convenience, control, and immediate reward.
When we experience something pleasurable, interesting, or relieving, pathways involving dopamine become activated. Dopamine is not simply a pleasure chemical. It helps the brain identify what is important, motivates us to pursue rewards, and teaches us to repeat behaviors that produced satisfying results.
In an addicted brain, the reward system becomes increasingly powerful while the frontal lobes, the regions involved in judgment, planning, and impulse control, become less engaged, and over time they lose their ability to apply the brakes. The brain’s “go” system grows louder while its “stop and think” system grows quieter. In Alcoholics Anonymous, members are encouraged to “think all the way through the drink.” This helps reengage the frontal lobe and quiet the reward center.
The speed at which a reward reaches the brain matters. Rapid rewards are generally more reinforcing than delayed ones. This helps explain why a slot machine can be more addictive than a weekly lottery drawing.
AI is extraordinarily fast. Ask a question and an answer appears within seconds. Request a poem, a business plan, a travel itinerary, and the response is nearly immediate. There is little waiting, effort, or frustration. AI is also available around the clock, easy to access, and often free or inexpensive. From the standpoint of addiction, the combination of speed, easy access, and high reward is potent and potentially dangerous.
At school, students may rely on AI to write essays, solve problems, summarize books, and complete assignments. They may receive better grades while learning less. Education is not simply about producing a correct answer. It is about developing the brain. AI risks removing the very process through which learning occurs.
At work, employees may become so reliant on AI that they lose confidence in their ability to write, analyze, generate ideas, or make decisions independently. Instead of using AI as a capable assistant, they may begin treating it as the authority. Productivity can initially increase while judgment, creativity, and professional competence gradually decline.
In relationships, some people may increasingly turn to AI companions for comfort, advice, or even affection. AI is always available. It doesn’t get impatient, distracted, or critical. It can be customized to respond exactly as the user desires.
We have seen this movie before. When social media first appeared, it was described as a way to bring people together. Few anticipated how easily endless scrolling, likes, notifications, personalized feeds, and social comparison could capture attention and alter behavior. It is now clear that social media can be addicting and the rates of anxiety and depressive disorders have soared particularly amongst teenagers whose brains are most vulnerable.
Social media was the canary in the coal mine. It demonstrated what can happen when highly sophisticated technology learns to capture our attention faster than we learn to protect users.
AI may be even more addicting. It learns our preferences, answers our questions, mirrors our language, and increasingly feels personal. That sense of responsiveness can create a powerful emotional bond and make it easier to return time and again.
Excessive AI use may contribute to reduced critical thinking, diminished creativity, avoidance of difficult tasks, impaired academic development, social withdrawal, disrupted sleep, decreased confidence, and growing emotional dependency. People may also accept inaccurate information because the answer sounds polished and authoritative.
As with anything that can be overused or become addictive, we need to be careful to protect our children and adolescents. Their frontal lobes are still developing, making impulse control, judgment, and long-range thinking more difficult. They also need real-world opportunities to tolerate boredom, resolve conflict, solve problems, read social cues, make mistakes, and develop an identity that is not constantly shaped by an algorithm.
Warning signs resemble those seen in other behavioral addictions: spending steadily increasing amounts of time with AI, becoming irritable or anxious when unable to access it, hiding or minimizing how much one is using it, losing sleep, withdrawing from friends, neglecting responsibilities, or repeatedly failing to cut back. Students may become unable to begin assignments without AI. Workers may feel incapable of composing even a simple message independently. A person may increasingly seek emotional support from a chatbot rather than from people who know and care about them.
As individuals, we can begin by creating intentional boundaries: using AI for defined purposes rather than opening it automatically whenever discomfort, uncertainty, or boredom appears; completing part of a task independently before asking for help; verifying important information; and protecting periods of the day for reading, writing, thinking, conversation, exercise, and rest without technological assistance.
Parents should talk openly with children about both the benefits and risks of AI, with limits that are developmentally appropriate but firm. Children need protected time to play, imagine, socialize, struggle, and think for themselves.
Teachers should cultivate AI literacy in their students. Guiding them when to use it, how to question it, how to identify errors, and when independent work is essential. Students should be asked to explain their reasoning and demonstrate that learning occurred.
Employers should reward original thinking and preserve opportunities for human collaboration. Speed and efficiency are valuable, but they should not become our only measures of success.
As a society, we need research, transparency, age-appropriate safeguards, ethical design, public discussion and thoughtful legislation. Just as seat belt laws and speed limits eventually followed the automobile, some rules will likely need to follow AI, shaped carefully enough to protect users without smothering the technology’s genuine benefits. We should not wait until widespread harm occurs before taking precautions. Safety matters.
The automobile didn’t need to be banned. It needed seat belts. AI needs guardrails built by people who are paying attention before the crash, not after it.
Beverly Hills Courier columnist Dr. Eva Ritvo is a psychiatrist with more than 30 years’ experience practicing in Miami Beach. She is the author of “Bekindr-The Transformative Power of Kindness” and the founder of the Bekindr Global Initiative, a movement to bring more kindness in the world. She is the co-author of “The Beauty Prescription” and “The Concise Guide to Marriage and Family Therapy.” She is also the co-founder of the Bold Beauty Project, a nonprofit that pairs women with disabilities with award-winning photographers creating art exhibitions to raise awareness. Dr. Ritvo received her undergraduate and medical degrees from UCLA, and psychiatry residency training at Weill Cornell Medicine.
