True connection can mean switching off the AI

Posted on 18 Sep 2025

By Adele Stowe-Lindner

With spring upon us, a fresh start beckons. I’ve just returned from a workshop for industry leaders at the National Artificial Intelligence Centre, where I put a not-for-profit lens to everything we were discussing, and the fresh start I’m thinking of involves digital awareness.

While generative AI offers incredible convenience and efficiency, it also quietly cultivates constant engagement, which erodes our ability to disconnect, finish and move on.

Disconnection – taking a break – is essential for critical thinking, creativity and digital wellbeing, qualities that are also essential for a community sector that is solving the planet’s stickiest problems. The housing crisis will not solve itself while we are having a never-ending tête-à-tête with our favoured gen-AI tool.

“Death-scrolling”, as my teenagers call it (scrolling numbly and without purpose through a social media app or even the news, like a zombie), is built into the algorithms of Youtube, Insta, Meta, TikTok and even mainstream news sites. This is widely known.

Generation Alpha, kids born since 2013, will never know a world without the internet. The Annie E Casey Foundation, a US not-for-profit that funds work with children, young people and families, reports that eight in 10 parents of Gen Alpha say their kids use mobile devices for seven to eight hours a day. It also notes a recent study of 10,000 early adolescents, ages 11 to 15, which found that one in four reported elements of addiction in their social media use.

The kids are addicted to screens and I would suggest, in most cases, so are we, as adults. But what of generative AI (gen AI) specifically?

Death of the search engine

Put your hand up if you still use a search engine. I use them less than I used to. “Suggest a cafe north of the river with cosy meeting spaces and good almond milk chai, within 500 metres of my next meeting.” Stand aside, Google. How do I reconnect the office printer to my new laptop? Move over, Bing. What ethical Monopoly Deal rules do you suggest if players want to build a consortium and help each other? (I need to avoid household blow-ups.) Gen AI, you got this.

I’ve written numerous times in support of the use of generative AI, and in fact the Institute of Community Directors Australia has published a book on the topic. We say that if the corporate world can increase its efficiency and quality at low cost using these tools, so should the community sector, because we have more at stake: people and the planet.

Community Directors provides AI governance training to encourage the community sector to take up the gen-AI tools available to it at low cost: think ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Canva and others. But I have never encouraged anyone to put aside their critical thinking. I have argued that gen AI enables us to get more done and potentially increase quality so we can do the important stuff, the human stuff, not so we can go through our careers and lives without thinking at all.

"With convenience comes cost. What are we willing to pay?"

Adele Stowe-Lindner

What is the cost?

With convenience comes cost. What are we willing to pay?

Have you noticed that generative AI does not – ever – just give you an answer then wave good bye? No. It ends each answer with “Let me know if you’d like help exploring more...” or “Would you like directions, walking times, or transport suggestions between the two?” or “Do you want me to give you a shortlist specifically for regional or rural Australia?” or “Would you like me to craft this into a strong, report‑ready sentence to drop straight in?”

See the theme? It always ends with a question mark, an invitation, a hook, to keep you engaged. It will not let you go. It is never the first to say goodbye. It’s like having a partner who can never leave a party without having one last conversation with everyone there, and then you need to call the shots and call it a night. (I’ll come clean: I’m often the partner who can’t say goodbye.)

What if Georgia O’Keeffe or Vivienne Westwood had never put down their tools and said, “Yes – it’s cooked.” That is what gen AI is turning us into: co-dependents with poor boundaries.

What can we do about it?

We need to practise the art of finishing. We need to be able to say “That’s enough” on our own terms. To get started, we can build tiny rituals into our digital lives, in the same way we teach children to say “Thank you for having me!” at the end of a play date. Close the tab. Turn off the notifications. Say “goodbye” to the app, even if it wants to keep talking. Teach your teams that stopping is as powerful as starting.

This one could be good, too: reclaim boredom. Reclaim the quiet moment between things. Let ideas simmer before you ask gen AI to summarise a meeting. In the community sector, we are builders of trust, not just efficiency. Sometimes the best ideas come not from the next prompt, but from the pause before it.

In the spirit of transparency, I posed the question of how to switch off to my gen AI tool. How could I get through its relentless (unethical?) helpfulness? It offered some great suggestions and a couple of middling ones. At that point, I closed the chat with a firm but polite “Thank you for having me”, took the insights I needed, and, with a breath of empowerment, let myself go.