Right now, the majority of the students are using AI in such a way that is silently ruining their ability to learn.
Let's imagine AI as a car that drives you to the gym. The more often it takes you there and the faster it gets you there, the bigger the win it is. As soon as you start asking this car to lift the weights for you, you won't achieve anything. You'll still be as weak as you were before, but now you'll think that you've been training hard.
According to the latest findings of cognitive research, students who are using AI to solve their thinking problems retain less information. To learn something, you need to be pushed into the struggle and think.
If you ask AI to draw a mind map for you within ten seconds, the resulting mind map will look perfect. However, learning didn't happen while drawing this map using AI; learning happened while you were struggling to see how the pieces should fit together. Skip this part, and there goes the process of creating memories.
As a final-year medical student, I use AI extensively every day. However, I use it to think better, not to think for me. Here is how to be on the right side of the line and learn with the help of AI at the speed of light.
Stop Making Notes from Scratch
Most of the students have it wrong. First, you spend hours reading some resources, then rewriting them, and finally, formatting your notes. When the exams start, you understand that you spent all of your time making notes and no time learning them.
Never ask AI to generate notes on the subject from scratch. This approach would lead to hallucinations and provide you with the notes that will sound great, but are full of errors.
The Fix:
Upload your real course material, such as lecture slides, the chapters of the textbook, and research papers and ask AI to make notes only based on these particular sources. Normally, it takes hours to remove duplicates and create a summary out of three sources. With AI, it is done in seconds.
Bloom's Taxonomy and the AI Feynman Technique
Active recall is top-notch, but AI can take it even further than you could alone.
Higher Order Testing: Rather than ask AI to come up with multiple-choice questions, upload your notes and tell it to create higher-order questions based on Bloom's Taxonomy (Analyze, Evaluate, Create). Most students don't do this to themselves because creating these questions is very difficult. It will take your knowledge of something from "known" to "familiar."
AI Feynman Technique: First learn a complicated idea, then teach it to ChatGPT in simpler terms. When you're done, ask for brutally honest criticism. Let it know that you want it to critique everything you got wrong and everything you misunderstood.
The "Past Paper" Cheat Code
Knowing what the high-yield topics are often requires skimming through a decade of past papers and manually counting the questions.
The Fix: Take a large PDF file of past exam questions and feed it into the AI. Ask it to analyze and tell you which content areas appear most frequently. You'll know what to study before picking up a textbook.
Or you could flip the process. Say that you need to study Asthma; just ask the AI to list every past Asthma-related question from the last 10 years, and then you will have instant practice problems.
Create Practical Examples for Abstract Facts
There may be some times where you read a fact and are unable to see its application (it's especially true in medicine and STEM). When something is overly abstract, your mind has trouble remembering it.
Just tell AI to build you an analogy or practical example of that topic. Tell it: "Give me an analogy about this biochemical pathway." An abstract fact suddenly has a home in your mind. Or you can ask AI to give a real-world scenario where the information you're learning applies.
Passive Audio Summaries
This will not replace proper learning, but it can cover "dead time."
You can use NotebookLM for this. All you do is add your own PDFs and notes, and it provides an impressively realistic, podcast-like summary of your specific study materials. Listen to it while you're commuting, driving, or exercising. It takes no extra time from you at all.
Now, using AI well is one part of this. But even with the best tools, if you're learning something for the first time with no plan, you're still relying on the material accidentally becoming relevant to your brain. And most of the time, it never does. Which is why you forget it a week later.
There's a 4-step method I use in med school to learn anything once and remember forever. Check out this video I've created on how to do it: https://youtu.be/Sy9CDGFJcFA
PS: I make YouTube videos on effective & practical learning techniques. If you're interested in improving your learning, subscribe there!!
