What I do

I give it pdfs and a long instruction, and then ask questions.

Best Service and Local LLM

I use ChatGPT, should I switch to something else or something local ?

Give AI access to screen, able Point-&-Ask while reading ?

I saw video people doing similar things w/ Gemini, Claude.

1. I may use local OCR/CV and send it to LLM as text.

2. and use local Speech to text ?

Should I give ChatGPT access to local files for this purpose

1. LangChain - TechLinked - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXP7tCI9PI

2. Local LLM Retraining, RAG, Context Docs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFgyOucIFuk

How else can I use AI to study ?

This specific forum, Suggestions, Comments and Support, is here for "Ideas, questions and support for the forums",

Your questions do not fall into this category.

1 hour ago, HbWhi5F said:

How else can I use AI to study ?

You should not use AI to study

Studying is about improving your mind, and offloading effort to a computer algorithm compromises that. The fact that AI hallucinates answers makes it even worse. Plus the ethics of it all.

There is no shortcut to understanding and AI is the proof...

If we assume that AI knows everything, then it's easy to prove that it doesn't understand what it knows... 🤔

Knowing facts is not understanding them.

If people bothered to fact check the details these programs produce, it might be a fair way to study since you still need a basic understanding of the material and you're actively reasoning through it, hopefully figuring out why the facts are relevant or not. Unfortunately, I see too many just assume the AI is completely accurate and just saved them a bunch of reading and studying, drawing conclusions only a brilliant computer mind could do so quickly.

3 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

If people bothered to fact check the details these programs produce, it might be a fair way to study since you still need a basic understanding of the material and you're actively reasoning through it, hopefully figuring out why the facts are relevant or not. Unfortunately, I see too many just assume the AI is completely accurate and just saved them a bunch of reading and studying, drawing conclusions only a brilliant computer mind could do so quickly.

The problem can easily get compounded when using AI to study physics. One example is having AI look up a specific equation.

One example being if you were to look for relations specific to a metric or methodology. AI could very well return a relation specific to say a canonical treatment as opposed to a conformal treatment.

With the FLRW metric it often confuses conformal coordinates as opposed to commoving coordinates.

If the AI user isnt aware of these distinctions to recognize the AI mistakes they could easily get confused as well as get frustrated when they try to apply those equations. As AI looks through literature Ive seen it throw in cosmographic metrics as well and mix them with commoving metrics.

(LOL the above can also be used to recognize someone relying too heavily on AI)

Edited yesterday at 03:52 PM1 day by Mordred

3 hours ago, HbWhi5F said:

How else can I use AI to study ?

1) Avoid large heavy type in capital letters. I annoys many people, who think you are shouting.

2) As a student you should be thinking for yourself. But search engines are very useful to obtain factual information eg "what is the radius of the earth in metres?" , "what is the composition of the atmosphere of Mars?".
In other words it is Ok to use it to find factual data, you intend to use but you must be in charge of the calculation or other use.

2 hours ago, StringJunky said:

Knowing facts is not understanding them.

The issue with AI and perhaps data availability on the internet in general is that many students assume that all necessary facts are out there and that is a waste of time to learn them in the first place. The issue is that as a consequence they lack a very basic foundation to create some level of understanding. Some of the most frequent issues we see among students is that tend to fail at synthesis, i.e., connecting isolated facts. Offloading that further, obviously won't help. It is like having an electric piano that plays scales on its own and wondering why one doesn't get better at playing the instrument.

The fact that OP starts with a summary rather than reading the actual document as first task show the erosion of basic skills. AI could be used to test ones comprehension after reading, for example, but a small minority of students is doing that (usually those that are top students either way).