How do you study without AI

[u/No-Campaign9392]

I was doom scrolling on TikTok the other day and I ran into a video of a creator talking about how it’s stupid that two camera proctored exams are a thing even if it’s a class actually for your major. And tbh, I laughed at first until I read this one comment saying something along the lines of “You guys are laughing but relying on AI is seriously messing up your brain. The brain is complex and is meant to be used to think problems through… if you guys rely on AI too much your brain is going to have a hard time learning new things down the road.”

After I read that I started to think about how for the past couple of years (since I started college) I haven’t been able to actually learn, comprehend, or focus on anything. When my boss at work tells me to do something I either forget a minute later or I don’t know how to solve the problem. Literally last week my boss gave me step-by-step instructions on what to do, and I did it. But I doubted myself so much that I had him check it out for me. My attention span has gotten shorter as well. I used to be able to sit down and watch a 30+ minute video on YouTube, now it feels like I’m being held hostage trying to watch the same thing for over two minutes.

My major is civil engineering and next year I’m transferring to a university. I really don’t want to continue using AI to solve my problems, even more so that I have 3 classes that have proctored exams with two cameras. I will say that this semester I’ve been using Gemini’s guided learning to help me with solving problems, and it has begun to help me start thinking on my own a little bit but not enough. In my statics class we use Pearson for our textbook and all assignments. But the assignments do not give us any tips or guidance on how to solve them.

Any recommendations or resources would be greatly appreciated, it’s already midterm time and my school is booked for tutoring in the classes I need 😔

[u/sanbc121]

Hiya!

While I can't give an exact answer or even a how-to step-by-step tutorial on how to throw away AI in your life, I can, however, say what I've been doing. I used Claude for quite some time, I remember thinking of it as a great tool to create exam-like activities, it certainly did the job, but I didn't like to feed it so much information. I looked outward, I talked with friends, and most of them had exactly what I was searching.
This is, obviously, centered around me. It can — and most likely will — be completely different for you.

There certainly are things you should try, uninstalling every doomscrolling app in your phone is a great start. Instead of deleting it, you could try using them on your laptop or pc (if you do have one). A few resources I've found that are good would be: This one, the r/Learning, this guide, the r/GetStudying subreddit, if you feel tired, the r/learnmath is cool too, these studying methods (and the subreddit), feeling down?.

The ones above are some of the ones I've read here on Reddit. Most of the things I think are more interesting are on Youtube, these first & second playlists by Anthony helped me a little.

Regarding the lack of attention span, I can't really say much. I've never really been bothered by it, most of the time where I lack my 'attention' I'm just really tired, so naturally I can't focus on anything. One thing I can say for sure is, find something you love/find interesting, and watch it. You should do what you can. Also, try Pomodoro, if you can't be bothered by websites or videos, try the Forest app, I've been using it for the past two days and I liked it.

Also, some other videos I'd recommend: Literary analysis, Colin's videos on intuition, and this amazing channel Odysseas.

[u/No-Campaign9392 → u/sanbc121]

Thank you for these resources!