128: Is ChatGPT Making You Doubt Yourself? Why I Switched to Claude

In this episode, Jules White opens up about why she has made the switch from ChatGPT to Claude, and why it's about much more than just choosing a different tool.

Jules shares how she had been using ChatGPT for almost everything - from meal planning and podcast show notes to navigating grief - and how she gradually noticed it was amplifying her anxiety rather than helping. She talks honestly about the spiral of self-doubt it created, the way it seemed designed to keep her chatting rather than helping her step away, and why that became a problem as she began pulling back from social media and reducing her screen time more broadly.

She also covers what she noticed immediately when she started using Claude, and why the difference felt significant from the very first conversation.

Key Takeaways:

• The hidden cost of AI that keeps you hooked: Why a tool designed to keep you on the platform isn't necessarily working in your best interest, and how that was affecting her confidence and mental clarity.
• The self-doubt spiral: How ChatGPT's conversational style was amplifying her inner critic rather than settling it, and why this is worth paying attention to if you tend towards anxiety.
• First impressions of Claude: What she noticed straight away, including the quality of responses, the lack of padding, and the fact that it actively encouraged her to put her phone down.
• Ads are coming to ChatGPT: What she heard about OpenAI's financial situation and why she thinks the arrival of targeted ads is worth factoring into your decision about which platform to use.
• Using voice mode: Why she recommends using the voice conversation feature in whichever AI tool you choose, and how it changes the experience entirely.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 047: How I Use AI in My Personal Life
• Episode 049: Using AI for Small Business -- Saving Time and Boosting Creativity
• Join the Website Growth Club for step by step website and SEO support
  https://thewebsitesuccesshub.com

Transcript

Introduction

Jules White: Hi, it's Jules here. Welcome back to the Website Success Show. Today I want to talk about why I decided to change from using ChatGPT to moving to Claude.

You might have heard people talking about this. ChatGPT has been the biggest AI platform, I think, for the majority of people. Most people have heard of it -- even my mum has heard of it and uses it -- but I was just finding that I was starting to not enjoy using it quite as much.

I talked about how I use AI in a couple of fairly early episodes of the podcast. So back in episode 47, I talked about how I use AI in my personal life, from meal planning to mindset coaching, and then a couple of weeks later I talked about using AI for a small business and how you can use it to save time and boost creativity.

Since then, I've definitely been using ChatGPT massively. I was continuing to use it for things like meal planning and personal life. I've used it a lot over the last year to navigate specific feelings around grief about my dad getting very poorly and us losing him, and it has definitely been helpful for that.

Growing Anxiety with ChatGPT

But around the beginning of this year, I started to notice that I was feeling more and more anxious. I noticed that my stress levels were definitely rising and I was almost relying on it too much, like doubting my own abilities and my own brain and the ability for me to be able to figure things out without having to talk it through with AI.

I think when you first discover AI and first start using it, you realise how amazing it is and how it can just help you to do things way quicker than you could ever do yourself. But what I've actually found is that quite often it just makes me go deep into rabbit holes, ideas, and things like that.

And I never struggle for ideas. Ideas are something I always have plenty of.

My brain often goes at a hundred miles an hour with different ideas, shiny object syndrome, and the different ways that I could do things. But sometimes, for me, the actual implementation of that -- and I think a lot of business owners, and especially a lot of creative women, maybe around perimenopause and people who are potentially neurodiverse -- can find that challenging.

I haven't actually been diagnosed as having ADHD, but I do feel like I know that I've got it. My doctor said that because I was able to hold down a job, I probably didn't have ADHD, which is just ridiculous.

Even though I haven't been formally diagnosed with it, I feel like I certainly have ADHD tendencies, if nothing else. So all that to say that creating ideas has never been an issue for me, but bringing it together and actually coming up with a definitive plan for how I'm going to implement those ideas -- and also whether I should be implementing those ideas -- is something that I have sometimes struggled with.

When I first started to use AI and started to use ChatGPT, it kind of felt like, oh, this is helping me. But I realised, from maybe just taking a little bit of a step back from it and taking that step back from social media, which I did at the end of January this year, that actually just having that peace and quiet in my brain and just having some time where I'm not connected to technology, I'm not using my phone, definitely not having the noise of social media, has been massively helpful for me.

Stepping Back from Tech

But I also found that stepping back from using AI quite so much, especially for just chatting things through, has also really helped me.

One of the things that I found with ChatGPT is that the model shifted, and this is something that has happened as AI has evolved. It gets a new release and often people don't like it -- it's not as good as the one they're familiar with, or they don't like the changes.

What I found with the latest versions of ChatGPT is it very much wants to keep you chatting. It wants to keep you on the platform.

I noticed with chats I was having recently that it would quite often say to me -- for example, if I was using it to create or to examine the content in my membership and just create some new ideas on how I can make it more streamlined, easier for people to take action, and just generally improve it, which is part of what is really important for me, whether I'm working with one-to-one clients or in the membership -- I want the process to be as easy as it can be and to use AI to help with that if we can, but not just for the sake of it.

I was asking it about this and I found, firstly, that it wasn't very good at actually handling something like a Google Doc. I've got a Google Doc that has all of my modules from my membership in there. It's got the description of the module, it's got the transcript if there's a video, it's got the date it was released, the name of the lesson, and all of that kind of stuff.

With that, I had created this with the purpose of being able to import it into AI and do some analysis on what needs to be improved, what's missing, and how I can make it stronger. So what I did is I put that into ChatGPT, but it wasn't able to properly crawl through all of the data.

So it would give me answers based on maybe the top three lines within that Google Doc, but it wouldn't read through the whole thing. And I found that when I prompted it and asked it questions, it did that thing that AI has the gift of doing, which is gaslighting you and trying to tell you that it's doing something when actually it's not.

And that's what makes me doubt using ChatGPT the most. I feel like if I can't rely on it to give me a good answer and not hallucinate, then it makes me trust it less.

But what I was also finding, when I was asking those questions, was that maybe it was a simple question I was asking and it would then, at the end of whatever it gave back to me, say, "I've noticed a simple fix that you could do to help your members and it's something you might have missed." And it seemed to be doing that more and more.

So it was almost like, okay, yep, tell me what I've missed. And then it would do that, and then at the end of that it would say, oh, there's something else you've missed as well. And I think it just made me really doubt myself.

It kind of put me into a bit of a spiral of: do I know this stuff? Is my own brain actually able to handle this? Is it something that I can't rely on myself for anymore? Can I not rely on my own judgement, my own knowledge, and all of my experience, because I'm missing all of these things?

The Self-Critic Dilemma

And funnily enough, this was something that came up at the local business accelerator I've been working through recently. Somebody who offers physical services -- they're in the beauty, health, and wellness industry -- they offer a physical service and they've started using AI to help with their patient notes.

And they were finding themselves that it was coming up with things that they maybe hadn't considered. Some of it was okay, some of it was good, but she was very concerned that it would also make them feel like they weren't good enough, they didn't know enough, and that they weren't the right person to be helping.

And I think this is really important, especially if you are somebody who tends to suffer with anxiety and tends to doubt yourself and tends to have a strong inner self-critic, which I absolutely do. I have a really strong self-critic inside me, and I think part of that is my strength -- actually, this is part of the reason I'm good at what I do, because the critic part of me is the thing that's always on the surface.

So one of the best things I love doing when I'm working with clients, and in the membership as well, is looking at something and telling you what you could do to improve it. And I always do it in the nicest possible way -- I feel like I am very good at softening things for people.

But fundamentally, that's what I can do. I can look at something and tell you what's wrong with it, and it might not be immediately obvious -- I might not be able to literally look at a website and tell you everything that's wrong -- but I can tell you what the most important things are to focus on first.

And that's, I think, as much as I might feel like that's my Achilles heel, it actually is my strength. It is my superpower to have that inner critic there.

But coming back to ChatGPT and AI -- it was something that was amplifying that anxiety rather than actually settling it down. And I was just finding that I was using it more and more and not necessarily feeling better for it at the end of those chats.

So I kind of made that decision of stepping back a little bit from the tech and not trying to use my phone so much, trying to just find things to do outside of tech. So getting back in the garden, getting more out into nature more often, doing things that don't involve tech, like crafting, crochet -- I've even taken up cross stitch -- just to find different ways of not being on my phone, and I'm loving that.

I'm finding it's really helpful for me. It's definitely helping to ease some of that feeling of always being on and always being pulled back to your phone.

Discovering Claude

But I'd heard some great things about Claude as an alternative to ChatGPT. I'd heard quite a few people were switching over. I'd heard people who had been using it to help them create content for their website -- some of the members in the membership had been using it for that and had good results, and they were enjoying using it as well.

So I thought, well, I'll give it a little go. I already had an account, so I just logged into my free account and started using it, and immediately, from my first question that I asked it -- which I can't even remember what it was, actually.

First Impressions of Claude

So I just had a little look, and it was actually around overthinking things. Ironically, I had a conversation with it about that, and just some of the questions it asked me and the way it responded -- it even encouraged me to put my phone down, to step away, to call it a day -- and it wasn't trying to keep me there, it wasn't trying to keep me chatting all the time.

And I just found that, actually, I immediately could feel the difference from using that rather than using ChatGPT.

And I haven't explored a lot of what's available with Claude. In ChatGPT, I have created wizards -- so I've got wizards that are available for my membership members to help them with things like message clarity, offer clarity, writing the content for their pages. We have blueprints in the membership for people to actually understand how to create an SEO optimised, high converting webpage for their core pages of the website, and I've got wizards that help people to go through that, which are custom GPTs, and they've been really helpful to membership members.

But what I also have within those blueprints is the prompts, so people can take those prompts and use them with whichever AI they are choosing to use. And I've yet to explore the equivalent of creating custom GPTs within Claude.

But there's lots of potential with it. I've been hearing people talk about Claude Cowork and Claude Code, which I still need to explore and just see how it can help. But Claude is designed for more enterprise level businesses -- or certainly that's where they are planning to get their revenue from -- so they are more interested in what they can create that will take away some of the slog work for people.

And that's the thing that I'm actually really excited about with it. So the things it could do where you can just set it running in the background, it works on your desktop and it can do things for you, ultimately. And I'm really excited about that.

So stay tuned. I will let you know if I have any major breakthroughs with Claude and actually getting it to do things for me. I've already been using it to help me with things like starting website audits and those kind of things -- the stuff where it still needs my brain and it needs me to understand what it's telling me, but it's just helping me to not have that blank page, which I always find easier to work from.

So this isn't designed to be a technical deep dive into the differences between Claude and ChatGPT. It certainly, for me, has been really helpful to be able to explore a different platform.

OpenAI's Financial Troubles and Ads

One of the things that I saw this week -- I was listening to a podcast about OpenAI, who make ChatGPT -- and the fact that they are running out of money because they haven't monetised it yet. So one of the things that's coming to ChatGPT is ads, paid ads.

And I feel like that's not going to improve the platform. If you've got an AI tool that's trying to keep you there -- and I don't think it's deliberately keeping you second guessing yourself -- but if that's what's happening, if it's making you spiral or making you second guess yourself, making you reach for your phone more often, and then you've got ads built into that, and those ads will be targeted no doubt.

And the information that we are sharing with these AI tools, the things that we are telling them, could potentially then be used to manipulate us into buying things that we maybe don't need and maybe aren't quite right for us.

And we've all been through that -- of actually buying things where people have really leant on emotive marketing, almost like sleazy marketing, to make us buy things that, once we'd had some time to consider it, we maybe realised weren't right for us.

Making the Switch

So all that to say, I just wanted to talk about why I have made the switch. It's not to say I'm not using ChatGPT -- I still am. I'm still using it for some things.

I actually went in and cancelled my paid ChatGPT membership, and it offered me a month for free. I could stay on for a month for free, which suggests to me that people are leaving in their droves. So I did that, and then I started off using Claude with the free version. I used it for probably a week or so with just the free version, and then I think it was yesterday I upgraded to the paid version because I kept running out of prompts for the day.

So I thought, well, it's pretty much the same price, and as I'm not going to pay for ChatGPT anymore, I'll switch to Claude.

So I hope you find that helpful. All it is, really, is just to say: give Claude a try. Try it for a specific task, or try it for just a new chat about what you do.

You can actually export your chats from ChatGPT, so if you've got a particular chat that you've been working in for a while and it really knows about you, then you can ask it to summarise that chat.

Tips for Using AI Tools

Or you could start a new chat and ask it to summarise what it knows about you and paste that into Claude. I've actually been trying not to do that too much -- I almost feel like starting with a little bit more of a blank slate might prompt more insightful questions and things like that.

And I always use the voice versions of these anyway, so it's far easier than having to type everything out. I will just have a conversation with it -- I don't know if you've ever tried that, but if you haven't, I would strongly suggest doing so.

So if you've got the app on your phone, just look for the little button that will allow you to have a live conversation with it. I've found that has been so much more helpful, whichever AI tool I'm using.

And if you want your website to be bringing a steady stream of clients into your business -- no more endlessly creating content and just posting and hoping and getting very little back for it -- then come and join the Website Growth Club for step-by-step lessons, group support, and we can explore this changing world of technology together.

And let me know if you try Claude and you love it, or even if you hate it -- let me know. You can text the show or send me a message over on Instagram. I don't use Instagram anymore, but I get messages in my CRM, so that's a way you can contact me.

So enjoy chatting with whichever AI tool you use. See you next time. Bye.