Happy Tuesday!

I’ve seen a lot of posts flying around social media about ChatGPT, the AI Chatbot that can do a lot of things for you: summarize long academic papers, outline LinkedIn posts, and even write exam-grade essays (among other things).

There’s also a quieter debate: “What’s the point of learning and building new skills if AI can do almost everything?”

Personally, I feel that the value of learning as a human comes from:

1. our lived experiences
2. our decision-making and execution of skills based on our lived experiences (for better or for worse)

Generally, AI can aggregate everyone’s life experiences, but it won’t combine them into your unique combination of lived experiences.

AI can do things, but it can’t do them through the lens of the life experiences it has aggregated unless prompted—and it can be tiring to manually account for the billions of variables and context in your life.

Even if future developments overcome these obstacles, AI’s decisions might not be the most suitable decisions for you. They might be logically sound, but not necessarily emotionally or morally viable.

Therefore, there’s still a lot of value in human learning. ChatGPT can accelerate the learning process, but only if we use it correctly:

1. Do things yourself first
2. Get feedback on your work from ChatGPT
3. Tweak your own work (with citations)

1. Do things yourself first

As a beginner, you haven’t yet built a strong intuition for discerning right and wrong answers. If you don’t double-check the output of ChatGPT (which hasn’t achieved 100% accuracy yet), your work might eventually be misguided or incorrect.

Additionally, based on the principles of learning, we learn best when we:

• Pay attention to what we’re learning
• Recall the information more often
• Associate the incoming information with our prior knowledge

Jumping straight to ChatGPT for answers skips all of these principles. Copying and pasting ChatGPT’s output into your notes is like copying someone else’s notes—it requires minimal attention and effort.

Doing is learning, so do it yourself first.

• Summarize information in your own words when taking notes.
• Draw upon your life experiences to come up with your own examples.
• Brainstorm, outline, and write that first draft on your own, consulting ChatGPT at the end of each stage (see the next step)

2. Get feedback on your work from ChatGPT

Practice is the key to mastery, but it’s also possible to practice the wrong thing.

That’s why Deliberate Practice is important: Get feedback (from ChatGPT or other people) on areas of improvement and tweak your practice accordingly.

Again, no AI tool in this world has 100% accuracy. Critically evaluate ChatGPT’s output as you would with feedback from a human:

• How is this suggestion different from what I’m currently doing?
• What are the pros and cons of this suggestion?
• How can I act on this suggestion?

3. Tweak your own work (with citations)

As you tweak your work based on ChatGPT’s results, it might be helpful to document:

• What prompts you used,
• What ChatGPT’s original answer was,
• What changes you’ve made to your work as a result of the output,
• Why you’ve made (or rejected) those changes to your work

This might sound tedious, but it helps you in many ways:

• you’re being more intentional about how you’re using the tool
• you’re reflecting and developing an intuition for what makes a great piece of work
• you’re documenting your process so that you can easily reproduce your results in the future

A short paragraph incorporating these points could be:

I asked ChatGPT to “make me sound more confident and formal” in my academic essay on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. ChatGPT suggested that I change … and I accepted most of those changes, except for the word “manifestation”, because it’s a commonly used term in the field.

Finally, depending on your code of conduct, you might find it useful to attach this short paragraph as a disclaimer at the end of your work.

None of my newsletters thus far have been written by AI. I only use Grammarly to catch typos and change awkward phrases.

I’m still a beginner at writing and storytelling—I don’t have the habit of finding stories from my life and writing consistently. Using AI extensively now will only disincentivize me from building these habits and learning how to express myself.

That being said, I do believe AI tools are here to stay. It’s just not good for learning, especially if we aren’t clear about how we’re using it.