Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing many things, and one of them is how we study and learn. But it is one thing to talk about AI in the abstract and another, very different, to use it seriously to advance a subject. That’s where the real doubts begin: which tool is worth it, where to start or, above all, how to prevent the chatbot from becoming a a summary machine and you don’t have anything left. In a new video from Xataka’s YouTube channel We wanted to go right to that point, with a practical approach and a real user experience that will probably be familiar to you if you are a student.
Francisco Franconi shares his experience with us today. He is a university student and along this path he has discovered real gems to squeeze out. Gemini (yes, on this occasion we momentarily put aside ChatGPT to try a different and, on paper, very promising alternative). Even so, the interesting thing about his proposal is not so much in the specific tool as in the method: our colleague insists that his advice can be applied to any chatbot, because what makes the difference is not the model, but how you use it.
The key is not in the chatbot, but in the method
In fact, his first advice is very direct: “The first advice I am going to give you is that, If you are going to use AI passively, you are not going to learn anything“And it’s hard to argue. Franconi delves into one of the most common traps: asking AI to summarize a topic, copying it into a document and assuming that this is equivalent to studying. As he explains, this approach only creates an illusion of productivity. The alternative is to use it as real support, as a learning companion, not as a substitute that saves you mental work, and in the video he drops concrete advice to start doing it well from minute one.
The second piece of advice points to one of the most powerful advantages of AI in the educational context: its ability to adapt to different levels of difficulty. The key here is to turn the chatbot into a kind of on-demand private teacher, capable of explaining the same thing to you with progressive approaches until you really understand it. “What I do is ask the AI to explain the topics to me in the simplest way, let’s say, as I would explain it to a child. From there you increase the difficulty,” Franconi tells us. And nuance is important: it’s not just about simplification, but about building understanding in layers.
“What I do is ask the AI to explain the topics to me in the simplest way”
More equally valuable tips appear throughout the video. One of the most interesting has to do with context, something that many overlook when using a chatbot to study: content matters, but how it is taught also matters. “When we take a subject, not only the syllabus matters, but also how the teacher gives the content. The important thing here is that the AI has all the notestexts or slides necessary so that it can use them as a basis to teach you.” That is, if you want the AI to really help you, it is not enough to ask it a generic question: you have to feed it with the real material that you are using in class so that its answer makes sense within the framework of your subject.
And, of course, Franconi also enters the field where the casual user is separated from the one who really knows what he is doing: that of prompts. In the video he shares very worked examples, like this one: “You are a studio companion who is an expert in Contemporary Art. Your objective is to show me the contents of the documents that I have uploaded, following a strict and slow order. Your way of working is as follows:”, and from there he displays detailed instructions to guide the model. What is powerful is not just the text, but the logic behind it: defining a role, setting objectives, imposing a rhythm and establishing rules. And the best thing is that this scheme can be easily adapted to any subject.
As we say, there is much more in the video. It’s already published in it Xataka YouTube channelso if you want to see all the tips in context, we invite you to see it and leave us your comments both there and in this article.
Images | Xataka
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