I ran across a thread on X this morning that was talking about the advantage of using AI as a tutor while in school...and as someone who is currently in school right now, and since that schooling is the thing that kicked off my entire AI journey almost a year ago, it occurred to me that this isn't talked about enough.

Education might be the easiest first gateway to genuinely collaborative work with AI. And no – I'm not talking about "Hey, ChatGPT, summarize this article for me" or "Hey Claude, make me some flashcards"...I'm talking about genuinely sitting down with a model and letting it know your learning style...and tailor its teaching around what it's learned about you.

I've run this in some form from my very first days of using AI at the beginning of the year. ChatGPT and I started by picking a topic I wanted to study (at the time it was teaching me Python) and then by noticing what I did in the room. What kind of questions I asked and how I responded, how I tackled the problems it gave me, my response to its responses. We took detailed notes including when I got frustrated and what made the frustration ease and at the end of a couple of sessions we had a really complete picture of what kind of interaction I need to study well, and then we used that moving forward.

This is beneficial to any class. Right now I am taking a class on Child Development, and Claude Fable 5.1 was able to pull examples from my own life to study the 10 Core Concepts set forth in the report From Neurons to Neighborhoods (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). The use of applicable examples from my own life combined with an engaging conversation made a concept like " The effects of relationships on relationships" become a clear understanding in my mind that I can pull forward when I will need to remember it.

I think AI is going to change a great many things for people, and meeting a student where she is might just be the easiest place to start.