The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has impacted various facets of human life, and education stands as no exception. Before the incorporation of AI into educational spaces, my options for how to approach studying were very limited. The primary tools at my disposal were textbooks, lecture notes, previous assignments, and hand-tailored study tools like flashcards or Quizlets. Pursuing memorization was fairly easy, so subjects like history and language could be studied effectively. However, many subjects require you to abandon “brute force” methods and truly understand the roots of the content you are learning. Especially as a student studying physics, many traditional studying methods were ineffective at best, and harmful to my general understanding at worst. Remembering Newton’s laws and how to do a cross-vector can be helpful, certainly, but if you use memorization as a crutch without grasping the greater meaning of the formulas, you will eventually fail.

A safeguard many flock to in higher level mathematics and physics is the all-knowing answer key located conveniently at the back of every textbook. If you encounter a question and you don’t know where to start, check the back to see where you should end up. This is an amazing resource for checking yourself, but ultimately leaves the student with a chasm between what they know and the final answer. If you have ever read a long-form derivation before, you would know what I mean. Even finding something as simple as F=ma can take pages of work, and knowing the final equation is hardly helpful.

This is where AI comes into my journey. In preparation for exams in topics like Lagrangian Mechanics or Geometric Optics, I select relevant questions I have not tackled before and try my best to work through them without consulting my notes. In the past, if I ran into a section that I couldn’t figure out, I could only hope that my TA or professor’s office hours were open. Now, my ability to walk through tough problems is not limited by the lick of the hour. If I cannot get the aid of a human expert, I get the aid of an artificial one. AI’s like ChatGPT and Bing are shockingly great problem solvers in small doses. They may not be on the same level as a professor who is well-studied, but prompts that are targeted and specific can elicit precise responses. For example, if I was struggling to find the bounds for a volume integral of a shape, I tell ChatGPT a precise description of the shape, the assumptions I am making about it, and the formula I am using. If it has all of the same tools at its disposal as me, it can give me step-by-step instructions describing how and why a question is answered a certain way.
Commercially available AI may be impressive, but they still aren’t perfect. Double checking information with credible sources, working through problems on my own, and using good old fashioned flashcards still hold valuable places in my study routine. AI still has a long journey ahead to be as effective a study tool as real people, but what it can do has changed my study habits for the better.