How AI helps me study and what else I use it for

BarcelonaHave you tried? ChatGPT: You've asked him what he knows about you, if Catalonia will ever be independent, if machines will end up dominating the world, and you've even generated some images. And it's entertaining, but that's it, you think. You're not in marketing, you don't have a website to fill with automatically generated content, and you're not a criminal planning a massive scam. And you wonder if this artificial intelligence trend is of any use in real life. Well, yes, it can be useful. It has many possibilities, many more than I'm able to take advantage of, but I'll tell you what I use it for in my day-to-day life, in which it helps me.

Private tutors

There has been a lot of fuss about the use of generative AI by students with little desire to do work. But I must confess that the first time I used AI for a practical purpose was for studying, and also for doing work. However, not for cheating, mind you. Last year I did a postgraduate course and ChatGPT helped me. How? Well, I did a private tutor for each subject. Each one was trained with the notes and supplementary materials for the subject, and had instructions to focus on the content that I had added. In a case like this it is important to give it a prompt –the instructions– carefully, indicating what you should do, what role you should assume, and how you should do it in the clearest way possible.

These private tutors I did them with the paid option of ChatGPT, which allows you to create personalized GPTs, trained for a specific activity. But this can also be done without paying, keeping all the conversations on a specific topic in the same chat or in a project. They were useful to me throughout the postgraduate course, but especially to do the final work. Not because they wrote it for me, but to discuss with them the sections I wrote, enrich them and find points that could be improved. I had quite interesting debates with the virtual version of the course. teacher business strategy, and the finance one helped me clarify many concepts and review the figures for my project.

Conversation in English

This year I have returned to studying English after more than twenty years. I often read in English, but I am very rusty on the oral part and I needed a refresher. And in this, ChatGPT also helps me, especially the mobile application. It has a voice conversation option –activated with a button located at the bottom right– that allows you to speak almost as if you were speaking to a person. I ask it to review a specific aspect, such as the order of adjectives, the use of verb tenses or adverbs, and to analyze and correct my pronunciation. And we do it in a conversation that flows naturally. Being a machine, it is less embarrassing to make mistakes when speaking, but it is best not to get distracted: if you practice walking down the street with headphones on, sometimes you feel observed.

The paid option also allows access to Custom GPTs created by other users who are specifically trained to help you with English at specific levels.

Working with documents

It's not all about ChatGPT. Although OpenAI's chatbot is the best known, there are now many artificial intelligence tools. And to carry out research work or work in which you have to consult a lot of documentation that you have already downloaded quickly, LM Notebook, which is from Google, is very useful. It allows you to upload up to 50 different documents and converse with these files. It can generate a podcast to help you retain its most essential elements and if you ask it to look something up in the documents, it answers precisely by telling you where it got each detail it cites. This makes it easy to check whether it is wrong or not. It is the perfect tool to compare documents with each other or to look up all possible references to a specific topic.

Alternative search engines

We are used to using Google when we search on the Internet, but more and more Internet users are replacing it with one of the generative AI models. ChatGPT can do this: if you click on the globe in the dialog box, it answers the requests with the links from where it has taken the information it cites. Be careful, if you do not click on it, it will surely answer with old information and without offering you links. And, even if you click on it, if it cites a media outlet, it will do so in a biased way: it will prioritize information from those media outlets with which it has signed agreements. Always keep in mind that, like Google itself, these AI tools are biased and are loaded with the prejudices of their creators.

But if you have tried this ChatGPT option, I invite you to try it with Google too. Perplexity, which I find more useful. It is a much more focused tool to replace a search engine and more precise with the answers than ChatGPT, and by default it offers the links from where it extracts all the information it cites.

Ideas for cooking

Last week I asked ChatGPT: "I have five eggs, two potatoes, an onion, garlic, oil, bread, salt, pepper and little else at home. What could I cook that is not a potato omelette?" – I make omelettes quite well, although a friend in bad faith always insists that hers are better –. I activated the search option, the one with the globe, because I wanted to check what sources I used and it offered me three options: potatoes au gratin, eggs in the nest and garlic soup. It pulled the information from nine different websites – including the Mengem from ARA– and he gave me the steps to make each recipe and the ingredients they would need. Then I asked him how long it would take to make each of the dishes and, based on information from eight different portals, he gave me the preparation time, cooking time and total time needed for each of the recipes. The quickest was garlic soup (30-35 minutes).

Planning routes

With two friends, Lluís and Oriol, we have established an annual tradition: a three- or four-day motorcycle route in the summer. Yes, we fit the stereotype of men in their midlife crisis on motorcycles, but we have a good time and we travel without rushing, we are relaxed bikers. Last year we did it through the Pyrenees, from campsite to campsite with saddlebags and a tent. This year Oriol proposed doing the so-called Route of Silence, between the regions of Maestrat and Andorra - Serra d'Arcs. In summer it will be hot, but the landscape will be spectacular. Well, both Oriol and I have been trying ChatGPT to plan the route and we have found that it offers quite a few ideas, as well as alternative activities to do along the way and places to stop for breakfast and lunch – food is always an important part of any trip. The chatbot is still a bit fussy with the mileage and it is necessary to check it, but it is a good help to prepare a route like this.