It is a common theme that students use generative AI, most prominently ChatGPT, as a short-cut to generate content for written assignments. While this straight-forward application of the given resources to “get done as soon as possible” may be useful in the short-term, of course it’s no way to actually learn something in the end (aside from also conducting plagiarism). In the long-term, digital dementia is looming, which is a phenomenon that describes people who became more forgetful because they could google what they need anytime. Now with GenAI, the ability to create original thought and overall creativity are in peril, too. Imagine where we would end up if we outsourced all our creative work and thinking processes to AI for just two years.
So, why don’t we take a step back and use ChatGPT’s ability to explain any topic exactly in the way that we need it to, to our personal advantage? It may be a great writer, but it’s a better teacher. I have been using ChatGPT in this way for a while now and I can tell you: Using ChatGPT as a teacher, rather than a substitute, elevates our own understanding and enables us to learn better, leading to added value both for ourselves and our assignments or jobs. It can increase our understanding before we write any assignment ourselves(!), with our own knowledge. This way, we can also use ChatGPT to understand and learn any topic!
There are multiple ways to use ChatGPT as a teacher and overall learning aid. The most obvious one is having it summarize a long text that you have to read or having it explain a concept to you. In any case, specific prompts will help. Both of these use cases will be discussed further in part 2 of this blog series (find it here).
