Unleashing the Power of AI: Teach Yourself Anything with ChatGPT

Are you ready to learn new skills faster than ever? Unlock the Power of AI: Fast-track Your Self-Teaching Journey

The old way of self-teaching many skills may be effectively dead. Gone are the days of hours of Google searches, sifting through books at the library, and hoping you find the right information. Wasting tons of hours sorting through information to find the right information may be gone forever, and that is a good thing! By utilizing new technology, you can unleash the power of knowledge faster than ever.

Embracing AI for Efficient Self-Teaching

• Whether you want to learn to program, woodwork, garden, or learn a new language, it has never been easier to do so than today. Utilizing AI like ChatGPT, you can not only learn new things more efficiently, but do it in a way that feels natural and engaging.

• The days of competing for limited one-on-one time with an expert or sifting through vast amounts of data to find relevant information are over. AI can provide personalized guidance and filter the data, giving you precisely what you need.

How to Start Your AI-Powered Learning Journey

1. Find an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, to serve as your AI "teacher."

2. Use proper prompting to optimize your learning experience

You might be asking yourself, but why is AI making such a huge difference, what's wrong with the old way? Well, let me explain before we get too far into it. The old way you really had two options, taking classes or teaching yourself. Each had pros and cons, obviously, and AI can be used to gain the most pros with the fewest cons.

If you took classes you likely had an expert available to help you learn, but you were competing for that experts time with your classmates. You got a canned class and a limited amount of one-on-one time. Teaching yourself using online resources eliminates that one-on-one time issue, but you have to sift through more data and if you do need more direct help it becomes harder to get it. By utilizing AI, you get as much one-on-one time as you could hope for and the AI sorts the data for you only giving you what you asked for.

Now that we know why its a good idea to utilize AI, lets talk more about the how. Well first find a chatbot, like ChatGPT to utilize as your AI "teacher." The next step is proper prompting. Sure you could simply ask each question individually but that cuts back on efficiency. Its best to start a new chat with something along the lines of "Acting as a teacher, and with the knowledge that I am just starting to learn <enter topic here>, explain to me in a way a beginner can understand how to <topic again>."

The term for formulating these questions is called "prompting," which is a whole subject in and of itself, but by utilizing the framework above, you can start your journey to learning almost any topic imaginable. There is one key thing to take away here, AI is not perfect, and thus you should fact check occasionally to ensure you are actually learning accurate information, and also keep in mind when the last training of the AI you are using was. For instance ChatGPT's training cut off was September of 2021, so newer information will not be available.

Learning to Program with AI

Lets say you want to learn to program, or code as its commonly referred to, and lets assume you have no prior experience or knowledge of programming or any programming languages. This is a daunting task that is not easy, and in the past took years of learning and practice to even hope to begin to do anything of value. You would often have to spend countless hours in classes, reading books, and studying programming theory before you ever actually wrote a program outside of the cliché starter, "Hello world!" This fact turned off a lot of people to programming after sinking a ton of time for no tangible returns into the craft. You can also apply this same scenario to many other things like learning a foreign language, how to garden, or many other skills that require complex knowledge to properly achieve. I am sure we have all had experiences where we wanted to learn how to do something but eventually became frustrated and chalked it up to "I just don't have what it takes."

Now, utilizing the prompting method above, and keeping in mind what you have read thus far, lets explore what you came here for. How do I learn quickly, and efficiently so I can get my new skill off the ground. Simple, use a mix of hands on and theory by asking the right questions. Using our programming example (and keep in mind you can change programming to any topic) start off with the above prompt to set the stage and then move on to asking "how do I" questions or "give me an exercise <to learn a skill>" requests and let the AI push you in the right direction. By doing this you will be given the information you are looking for and assigned tasks that not only interest you to keep you engaged, but help you hone your skills. The best part is, that if you don't understand or don't like the task you can tell the AI and it will give you a new explanation or task!

In classic methods of teaching programming, and utilizing Python for ease of reading, you would start off writing a "Hello world!" program. In python this is one line of code, and may get you excited when you first start and see the statement print on the screen. Your book would welcome you to the language and tell you how to code this: print("Hello world!")

The problem is you are now done actually writing code for a while as you go over the theories of how loops, Booleans, and operators work. This can quickly lead to apathy and just giving up on trying to learn unless your truly dedicated. While the information is crucial to the end goal, the method is dry, boring, and ultimately difficult to absorb. The human brain is designed to discard information that doesn't engage it. If you are forcing yourself to memorize it, retention is lower and takes more effort, thus drastically lowering the efficiency of learning.

Now using AI, you can learn these theories in a much more engaging way. The AI will likely give you a starting point and remember the conversation, so as you go through each bit it will help you not only by giving you the same information but telling you how to apply it. By actually doing what you are learning about you tend to retain the information as well as feel engaged and excited by seeing the fruits of your labor.

How about growing your own food?

So lets use a less "techy" topic to really push the point home. Lets say you want to learn how to garden. You could spend weeks studying different types of soil, water retention, weather patterns, germination rates, etc. the list goes on. Reading this in books without doing anything to put it into practice is, for most people, excruciatingly boring, and when something is boring you are less likely to retain the information and more likely to give up. But what if you could hit the ground running instead? What if you told the AI you wanted to learn gardening and wanted to start with your favorite vegetable? For this example lets say Jalapenos.

You could let the AI know you want to learn to garden using your favorite vegetable and tell it where you are located. This way you can start with the basics as the AI can tell you the best time to plant, when you will likely need to water, and what steps to take to raise the plant. While this may feel like cheating, by actually doing the tasks your brain begins to relate information to outcomes. As you move along you will likely ask more questions about how to ensure the plant produces the most fruit, how to improve the soil, what types of fertilizers and pest control methods to use, etc. Before you know it, you have now learned a plethora of skills related to raising plants, and likely did so without realizing you were "studying." Ultimately there is one simple reason this method works so well, the way the human mind operates. Your brain is not designed to read for hours to learn information, that method of study is only a couple of thousand years old in a long evolution of the brain. Your brain is designed to learn by doing, trial and error, and correlating results to actions. Our ancestors that first began farming didn't read how to do it in a book, nor do most farmers of today. They learned by helping an experienced farmer sow fields and reap the rewards, doing each task along the way.

That reason is exactly why AI can help you learn faster and more efficiently than the classic method of taking classes, because if can give you the benefits of the knowledge from a class as well as tell you what to do to put it to practice, right then and there. It takes the vast amounts of human knowledge available to use and puts it into a format that you can use and understand immediately. Never before could you sit at your garden, tools and seeds ready and pull out your phone and ask an AI to give you step by step instructions on what to do as if you had a master gardener with you teaching you their craft.

Now, with all of this being said there is one part that AI can't help you with, and that's deciding to get up and do it. You ultimately have to make the choice to improve yourself, learn a new skill, and advance your life, but once you have, AI can help you to learn faster, do it better, and master a new skill in less time that our ancestors would have dreamed possible. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and break into a new skill today, and let AI guide you, step by step, so you can see the results of your efforts in record time!