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In part one of this series (find it here) I have already outlined why it’s a good idea to use ChatGPT as a teacher. But how can you use ChatGPT to aid you in learning? It’s all about packaging your individual needs into prompts. So, think first about how you can learn best. As for me, I like to get bullet point lists and definitions. Here are a few examples of my favorite prompts:

If you’re completely new to a subject:

• Imagine you are “expert in the field”. Explain “topic” to me on “high school/university/expert” level. Use bullet points.
  • Imagine you are John McAffee. Explain cybersecurity to me on high school level. Use bullet points.

If you are already familiar but lack clarity on how different things connect:

• In “field you are learning”, explain “level of detail” of “topic you learn” via “keywords you know should be in the explanation”.
  • In software engineering, explain the basics of agile development to me via sprints, scrum, and scope. Use bullet points.

If you have similar but different words but cannot find a good explanation anywhere:

• In “field you are learning”, what is the difference between “X, Y and Z”?
  • In statistics, what is the difference between errors, residuals, and variance?

ChatGPT is also good for reading. Imagine you have a long text to read and cannot get a glimpse on what it’s about. You can copy/paste the text into ChatGPT and tell it the following prompt:

• Summarize the key points of the given text in ten bullet points.

Let’s say ChatGPT gives you six distinct bullet points but four are kind of vague or around the same subject. Then you repeat the prompt but make it six bullet points. If the result is six concise bullet points, you get the idea of the text. Finally, you should still read the whole text with this understanding in mind (you will likely still find valuable new information in the text).

There you have it! Now you can use ChatGPT as your personal teacher. I hope you learned something and wish you great success!

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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).