I’ve heard horror stories about how students are using tools like Chat-GPT to write papers for them in school. That is the dumb way to use an AI tool. You don’t learn anything.
The SMART way to use it is to help you learn.
I’ve been studying for my Linux RHEL Admin certification. I’m self-taught and have used Linux for over a decade as my daily driver. I’ve been working on Linux systems at work for the past five years. I’m not an expert, but proficient. There are a handful of things I need to learn to pass the certification exam and make myself a better administrator. After that, I’ll go for the RHEL Engineer certification.
Chat-GPT has become my go-to tool for finding information. I still use startpage.com as my search engine but more and more I find myself just asking Chat-GPT. This has helped me immensely at work when I’ve gotten stuck troubleshooting something. I’m using it to help me study for my certification, too.
As I read and take notes, I practice on a virtual machine. There are times when I wish I were in a classroom and I could just ask the instructor something about what I’m reading. I can now ask a computer something, even something very technical, using plain English, and I get useful responses. I don’t allow myself to just copy and paste my notes. I type them out and practice what I’ve learned right then and there. On occasion, I will let it make a chart for me.
We even have conversations. It uses previous questions and answers to give context for new answers. We had a discussion today for about an hour as I was struggling to install LDAP on Oracle Linux 8. The textbook I’m reading teaches how to do it in version 7, which is different in some respects. Chat-GPT helped me navigate those differences and corrected me on mistakes. When I was done, I asked it for a summary of the conversation including my errors and their corrections. It was great!
If you’re not using an AI tool yet, you probably should be. I can imagine anyone using it for anything under the sun. If I were a fisherman, I’d probably ask it for advice on fishing. If I were an accountant, I might use it to help me craft a command for a spreadsheet. A chef might use it to come up with new recipe ideas. But please, for the sake of your own brain, don’t let it BECOME your brain. I can still manually do all the research to get to the same answers without Chat-GPT, but it takes much longer. Chat-GPT is making me more productive and helping me learn new things, both of which are golden.