🧠 How ChatGPT changed my approach to learning
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🧠 How ChatGPT changed my approach to learning
A guest contributor tutored himself with AI
Frank Andrade uses ChatGPT as a personal tutor. He writes about that in Artificial Corner, a lively newsletter featuring his practical AI experiments. So while I’m working on upcoming posts about Canva’s newest AI tools, emerging video apps, and my favorite apps of 2023, I’m pleased to share Frank’s special guest post below. Read on for his guidance on creative ways to use ChatGPT for learning.
Catch up on recent Wonder Tools pieces you may have missed:
Frank: ChatGPT has changed how I learn and practice new things every day.
I use ChatGPT not only to fix my mistakes, but also to learn from them.
I use ChatGPT Voice to explore new topics, simulate job interviews, and practice foreign languages.
You can even use ChatGPT Vision to learn from images!
Here’s how to use AI to enhance your learning.
Talk with ChatGPT Voice
Imagine simulating your next job interview or practicing your foreign-language speaking skills by talking with ChatGPT.
That’s actually possible with ChatGPT Voice.
ChatGPT Voice is a powerful, often-overlooked feature that allows you to talk with the ChatGPT phone app as if it were a person.
Say you’re traveling and encounter a subject you’re curious about. You can’t wait to learn more. Now you can put on your headphones, pick up your phone, and talk with ChatGPT to find out more.
The screenshot below shows the button you can press in the ChatGPT mobile app to initiate a voice conversation.
Bonus feature: your conversation is transcribed and you can access it again later.
ChatGPT Voice also makes possible things that were until recently inconceivable. One of them: simulating a job interview. You can ask ChatGPT to start a two-way interview with a special focus on the topics you expect to be asked about. You can also ask it to provide feedback on your answers.
Here’s a test I did:
The cool thing about simulating an interview is that by practicing explaining a concept in conversation, even with a bot like ChatGPT, you discover how well you know a given topic. If you’re not able to explain concepts in plain language, or if it takes you too much time to answer, you may have further work to do.
The same happens when you practice a foreign language. By talking with a real person—or ChatGPT— you gain awareness of your weak points and what you need to work on — pronunciation, sentence building, listening skills, etc.
Here’s a short recording of me speaking Portuguese and ChatGPT giving me feedback:
Grammarly fixes my mistakes. ChatGPT helps me learn from them.
I tend to make different grammar mistakes while writing. Grammarly is useful for correcting most of my mistakes, but there’s a problem. It doesn’t provide detailed feedback on the corrections.
The result? I end up repeating the same mistakes.
That’s a loop I was trapped in until I started using ChatGPT to complement Grammarly. Every time Grammarly highlights something to be corrected, I give ChatGPT the sentence and ask for a detailed explanation.
For example, while writing this article, I wasn’t sure whether the sentence below needed a comma.
It’s completely free unless you want to get a certificate and it’s instructed by Andrew NG a recognized leader in ML and AI.
ChatGPT not only corrected the punctuation but also provided an explanation.
See? Now I can study that punctuation rule I overlooked. Next time I write a similar sentence, I’ll write it correctly.
Learning from my mistakes and then focusing on those in my study sessions has been effective for me.
The prompt I used for the example above was this one.
Proofread this text and explain in detail the punctuation rules I overlooked
Along those lines, I have many other prompts that help me learn from different mistakes I make as a writer, programmer, language learner, etc.
When you can’t find guides or video tutorials, ChatGPT can still help you learn that topic.
If you’ve been reading my articles for a while, you know I use the Python library Pandas for data analysis. Well, lately, I’ve been learning a similar yet more powerful library called Polars.
Unfortunately, Polars isn’t popular. I couldn’t find many guides or tutorials online, so I used ChatGPT to learn Polars, building on the knowledge I already had from Pandas.
I’d ask questions like these to ChatGPT.
What will be the equivalent of polar’s select in pandas?
What’s collect in polars? and what’s its equivalent in pandas?
What exactly is the expression api? Is there’s something like that in pandas?
ChatGPT may provide answers using the knowledge it has from the Polars documentation. The difference? ChatGPT responds in plain English, something the technical documentation lacks.
What’s more, you can continue the conversation and ask questions following up on the previous responses, which is game-changing when learning new things.
When it comes to learning, I recommend asking any question of ChatGPT, regardless of how silly it might sound.
ChatGPT has improved the way I prepare for tests
They say that the best way to learn something is by practicing.
Whenever I don’t have material to put my knowledge to the test or someone to practice with, I use ChatGPT. I need only to provide the prompt below, specifying the subject and sub-topic I’m studying.
Act as an expert in [subject]. You’ll start a conversation with me about [topic]. In every response, you should provide your opinion and then ask me a question to test my knowledge about this topic. The questions should have the form of a test with multiple choice questions
I’m not going to bore you with more technical programming stuff as in the previous example. Instead, let’s see how I’d prepare for a history test, if I were in school.
By employing the prompt above with the subject “history” and topic “World War II,” I can simulate a history test.
ChatGPT Vision: Get knowledge from images
I’ve been using ChatGPT Vision mainly to get stuff done, rather than for learning. But after seeing this tweet (about ChatGPT being used to break down a diagram of a human cell), I believe that students— or anyone who works with visual material— can benefit from it.
You can start a quick biology, math, or language lesson from your school material. And if you’re not in school anymore, you can take photos and screenshots, give them to ChatGPT, and learn about whatever interests you.
Frank has been sharing his expertise on AI and tech on YouTube (30k+ subscribers) and Medium (100k+ followers) over the past 3 years. Now he’s focusing on his new Substack newsletter, Artficial Corner.
For more on learning with ChatGPT, check out two of Frank’s recent pieces:
How I’m Using ChatGPT to Learn Languages Fast (YouTube video)
How are you using ChatGPT lately? Comment👇
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🧠 How ChatGPT changed my approach to learning
Just wow! Many years ago, my life as a C+ photographer shifted dramatically with my first digital camera and the instant feedback it provided. I think this post and the possibility of using CHAD (my ChatGPT buddy) as my Spanish coach may just open a similar door to language learning. Who knows? But, I'm off to try. Thanks to each of you.
What a post. Every bit of just fascinating. Thank you