There’s a reasonable amount of anxiety that artificial intelligence might be making us all, well, a little less smart than we were before. AI, the worry goes, might become a crutch for critical thinking. When a chatbot can write an email, weigh an investing decision, or explain a complicated subject in seconds, we have fewer reasons to work through those tasks ourselves. And the less we exercise certain intellectual muscles, the rustier they may become.
But that’s not to say intellectual atrophy is some sort of inevitability. In fact, AI can be an incredibly useful tool for sharpening our minds. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude can help us become far more knowledgeable than we were before. Used creatively, AI chatbots can help us build subject-matter expertise ahead of a big job interview or an in-person exam, or pick up a new skill, like becoming comfortable with a computer terminal or even repairing our own appliances.
This isn’t to say that AI won’t have profound implications for how we produce knowledge and what society expects humans to know—or do—on their own. Still, there are ways to approach our own use of AI that can make our minds agile.
Use AI to test yourself
AI systems are extremely good at creating customized content, including personalized quizzes and tests on niche subjects where there isn’t always a good Quizlet or practice exam available. To boost your understanding of a topic, consider having AI generate questions for you, like your own personalized tutor, and then adjusting the difficulty to ensure you’re always challenging yourself.
When those questions get too easy, tell your chatbot to make them harder. If there’s a concept you’re struggling to grasp, ask for questions that help illustrate it. Keep going until you feel like an absolute expert.
Of course, like humans, AI makes mistakes, and there’s a risk that a chatbot will tell you something incorrect or simply make things up. Consider, though, that fact-checking the AI is a great way to challenge yourself and deepen your understanding even further. Another way to protect yourself is to write more specific prompts when asking for a test. For instance, rather than simply asking AI for math problems focused on integrals, give it the name of the textbook you’re working with, or provide example problems you already have. The model will work better if you ask it to formulate questions based on a specific resource, like an online textbook.
Another tip: If it’s feasible, ask the AI to quote directly from sources in its questions, rather than simply regurgitating them in AI-speak. And verify those quotations against the originals.
Use AI to find the right people
Tools like Claude and ChatGPT can be extremely powerful research tools because they use LLM-based understanding to identify relevant information, rather than simply matching specific words in a search query. That can be a major improvement over old-school Google searches.
One of my favorite things to use ChatGPT for is finding just the right experts to talk to. This might apply to my work as a tech journalist, say, when I’m on the hunt for a professor who has written papers about a very specific problem, like how an influx of self-driving cars affects overall traffic congestion in a city. But it can apply to my personal life, too, like searching for a doctor in my area who has expertise in treating a particular condition in patients with a similar medical history to my own. (One tip: Ask the chatbot to explain why each expert is relevant and provide direct links to their published work or credentials, so you can verify its recommendations.)
The idea is to use AI to find smarter, more relevant people to talk to, which can, in turn, make you smarter. It’s a twist on the old adage: It’s not just what you know, but who you know.
Use AI to workshop your ideas
It might be appealing to ask AI to write for you. But there are real downsides with this approach. Copy and paste directly from an AI interface, and you run the risk of sounding like a bot. Worse, AI can insert verbiage that doesn’t convey what you actually mean, leaving you to apologize for an AI oopsie.
There are better ways to use AI while assembling a big project. At an early stage, ask AI to sketch out a few different ways you might organize your work, along with the pros and cons of each approach, before diving in. Once you have a draft, consider asking AI to identify potential criticisms before you submit it for human review.
A computer can catch things that you, deep into a project, might overlook. Assembling an extremely long report? AI might be able to point out places where you’re repeating yourself. Making the case for a particular action or position? A chatbot might be able to identify places where you risk contradicting yourself. The upshot? Use AI to troubleshoot so that when you send your work to a human for review, you’re getting smarter, more detailed feedback instead of wasting their time with the basics.
Use AI to ask better questions
Journalists love to conclude interviews with, “What should I have asked you that I didn’t?” We do this because everyone misses stuff, including us. AI can help you do something similar.
Maybe you’re meeting with a hiring manager, a potential client, or even a professor during office hours. Consider not just coming up with your own questions, but asking a chatbot to suggest more questions you might ask. The more questions you consider, the better questions you’ll ultimately ask. And the better questions you ask, the smarter you’ll sound—and be!
Use AI to stay up to date
Chatbots’ search capabilities also make them useful for curating information and keeping you up to date. This doesn’t require reading and ingesting AI slop every morning. Instead, tell AI which topics you follow and always, always ask for direct links to original sources.
Maybe you’re following weekly news about a lesser-known industry your firm might invest in, or hoping to stay on top of developments involving an emerging therapy because you work at a biology lab. AI can surface relevant articles from across the web, helping you build a media diet tailored to your interests and drawing on a variety of sources. (Just be sure to check publication dates and read the original articles, rather than relying on AI summaries, which can mischaracterize sources or even invent them.)
Push AI to its failure points
In a world that’s growing ever more dependent on AI, it’s helpful to understand how and why these systems fail. If you want to avoid getting duped by AI, or falling prey to its errors and tendency toward sycophancy, it’s important to understand what AI excels at—and where it falls short.
One of the best ways to do this is by, well, playing around with AI.
Push a chatbot to speak extemporaneously about a subject you know a lot about, and see where it makes mistakes. See if you can trick it, and explore its sycophantic fault lines. Push the system to its limits, and see what happens when you give it jobs that are too difficult (believe me, it will struggle!).
The point is to understand AI’s limitations in a world increasingly dependent on it, so you can use the technology in smarter ways—and avoid its pitfalls.