The #1 question I’m asked by audiences is how parents should prepare their kids for the age of AI. My response is: “Seek understanding, not just answers.”

Using AI to get answers is like peeking at the answer key for a test–you might get a good score, but you won’t learn anything. If you use AI to seek understanding, the process will take longer, but you’ll learn why the answers are what they are, and be able to generalize from those specific answers to other situations.

However, chatbots don’t make it easy to seek understanding. You have to go out of your way to ask “why” questions and ask for explanations. Until now.

ChatGPT’s new “study mode” is a structured way to use AI to facilitate, rather than bypass, learning. It’s exactly what we need to make AI a tool for learning, not just cheating.

I just tried it out by pretending to be a high school student working on a history paper about ironclad warships in the US Civil War. Rather than just writing the paper, ChatGPT helped me brainstorm a thesis and pick supporting points. It even did a good job of refining my desired thesis.

I wrote:

“Had the Union Navy failed to adopt ironclads, and the Confederate Navy used ironclads to break the blockade, the war could have gone very differently.”

ChatGPT clarified this into:

“The Union Navy’s adoption of ironclad warships was a decisive factor in maintaining naval dominance during the Civil War; had the Confederacy gained the upper hand with its own ironclads, the Union blockade might have failed — drastically altering the war’s trajectory.”

Not bad, ChatGPT!

If you are one of those concerned parents, I recommend trying “study mode” yourself, and then sharing it with your kids.