Five Best Ways to Learn (but Not Cheat) With AI
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In the years since ChatGPT’s launch, AI tools have gained a bad reputation in the academic world for how easily they enable students to cheat by passing off work based on a large language model as their own. Even if a law student can write a text for you that doesn’t sound unnatural or filled with hallucinations , you’ll be cheating yourself because you won’t actually learn any of the material.
But that doesn’t mean these tools are useless in the academic world. When used correctly, they can help you study more effectively. Here are five ways to use AI in your studies without cheating or lying.
Use ChatGPT to discuss concepts
One of the learning methods I’ve previously recommended is simply talking to someone who knows nothing about the topic you’re studying to identify areas where you lack understanding. This is a great option because it helps you make connections between concepts when you’re trying to explain them to someone else, and it boosts your confidence in the subject when you can present it as an expert. However, you might not always have someone available to act as the clueless ignoramus in your role-playing game, and that’s where ChatGPT can help.
When I was in graduate school, I asked ChatGPT to let me “teach” him a topic I was studying—community-based health interventions—and we “discussed” different levels of community engagement. ChatGPT really had interesting questions that helped me come up with creative solutions that I could explore in my own work.
As the American Psychological Association notes, using language models in this way not only helps you think critically and creatively, but also helps you practice navigating technology in our changing world—a win-win for everyone.
Use AI to review articles
If you find yourself reading a lot of articles or reports, try using an AI tool to generate summaries for you. This is very useful when you need to compare similarities or differences between studies or derive key points to complete a paper. I fed ChatGPT an old article and asked for a summary, and the language model took about 30 seconds to condense 61 pages into a single key paragraph, highlighting the study design, objectives, results, and recommendations. This gave me a good idea of whether to continue reading.
If you only need to read a few documents, it’s still best to do it yourself, but this technique can be useful if you have a lot of them and want to quickly understand them. Just be sure to check your resume against the original document before taking anything at face value.
My favorite tool for this is Google’s NotebookLM . Despite my general reservations about AI, I often use this free program because I consider it more of a personal assistant than a knowledge source. It’s similar to ChatGPT and other language models in that you can ask it questions via a text input field, but it differs in that it only extracts answers from the resources you provide. You upload PDFs, links, YouTube videos, and any other materials you want to use as source material, and NotebookLM helps you make sense of them.
When using ChatGPT, it downloads responses from all over the internet, which can lead to serious errors. With NotebookLM, all generated data includes a link you can click to find the exact location in your resource cache where the information was retrieved. Instead of doing all the work for you, this tool simply helps you understand and organize all your materials.
Use ChatGPT to optimize your notes
If your notes are difficult to read or sort, ChatGPT can help. In graduate school, I assigned a Google Doc to each course and took notes in it throughout the semester, but inevitably, each document eventually became disorganized, chaotic, and practically impossible to navigate. As a test, I uploaded all my semester-long research methods notes to ChatGPT and asked it to extract the most important information. Not only did it extract the nine steps of research design and implementation, as well as the Belmont Report Principles (which were a crucial part of the midterm exam), but it also reminded me how much my grade hinged on each test, which I had apparently written down somewhere in that jumble of words. It specifically highlighted the parts I had written down multiple times, creating the perfect study guide.
Use AI to create flashcards and conduct self-tests
Flashcards and practice tests are great study tools because they force you to use active retrieval to retrieve information from memory. Creating these materials yourself is a smart move, because even reviewing your notes and writing practice questions is a learning experience. But I admit that when I’m responsible for creating my own test, I tend to limit myself a bit. (When I’m both a student and a teacher, I somehow always get an A. Funny how it works.) It’s better to outsource the creation of these materials to an impartial third party, and that’s another area where AI can be helpful.
You can ask ChatGPT to create flashcards and quizzes, but its interface isn’t designed for this, so it will only provide a brief description of what the flashcards should contain, based on the notes or resources you’ve uploaded. After that, you can create the flashcards yourself and begin studying (I recommend using the Leitner flashcard system , which is better for long-term retention). You can also ask ChatGPT to conduct a quiz, but your instructions should be specific: ask ChatGPT to ask you one question at a time and not move on to the next until you answer the previous one correctly.
But, again, I recommend NotebookLM . It has built-in flashcard and quiz features that are much more interactive and easy to use. You can click a button to create a multiple-choice quiz or a set of flashcards based on your uploaded materials. The quizzes and flashcards you create in NotebookLM are clickable, just like the quizzes you take in online classes, and are based solely on the materials you upload.
Use AI to create an essay outline and suggest sources
You definitely don’t want ChatGPT or similar language models “writing” your entire essay. It would be more than just a waste of your learning if your instructor ran your assignment through a tool like ZeroGPT to get a report on how much of the text was likely written by AI, which is unlikely to improve your grade.
Instead, you can use AI tools to plan and organize your essays. I’ve already compiled a list of the best AI essay writing tools , but here’s the gist: you can ask ChatGPT to help you brainstorm a topic or create an essay outline. You can also ask it to recommend sources you could explore and use in your work that you might not otherwise use.
Two caveats: ChatGPT is sometimes known to fake citations by inventing convincing article titles and citing reputable sources. Therefore, don’t rely on it for writing articles or research—use it to find and evaluate sources you can find and evaluate yourself. You’ll soon realize that the source you’re given simply doesn’t exist.
Similarly, when ChatGPT links to a source, it adds a small piece of code to the end of the URL that looks like this: “/?utm_source=chatgpt.com.” Even if you follow all the ethical guidelines and click every link to fully read the material and evaluate its merits, a bibliography full of references that clearly indicate you used ChatGPT for your research looks very unsightly—the reader might even think an artificial intelligence wrote it all for you. Therefore, before submitting your work, I recommend searching your documents for mentions of “chatgpt” and removing this hidden piece of code from all URLs where it appears. Remove everything starting with the question mark, and the link will still work, but it won’t create the impression that you’re doing something unsavory.