ChatGPT is great at taking my notes and turning them into Anki cards. Some tweaks are occasionally needed, but I have done well on numerous exams letting ChatGPT figure out the cards (and the formatting tedium) for me.
On a different note, ChatGPT has been making me feel stupid because I fail to come up with many use cases, while it seems like tons of technically unskilled people come up with all kinds of uses...
"please generate a series of short questions and answers that conform to a flashcard format, easy for studying, from these notes"
The responses were too verbose, so I asked:
"Please shorten the answers to short, easily memorizable lines"
That returned pretty good flashcards, so from there I asked it to reformat in a way Anki could consume:
"these are great, please convert these into a code block, where the question and the answer is on the same line, separated by a semicolon and not numbered"
But that put all of the flashcards on the same line, so I added:
"sorry I wasn't clear, each question should be on its own line"
That gave me what I was looking for. The next step is to paste it into Anki, fiddle with the recall and cards-per-day settings, and then get to training!
But creating Anki cards is effectively a form of review as well. If you automate that, then you miss out on going through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and subdividing it into self-contained pieces, which is required to come up with good cards.
Why wouldn't you get this? You just don't have to do it in order to make Anki cards.
> which is required to come up with good cards
Yes, and ChatGPT does this for you.
This isn't theoretical. I've used this to get As in multiple classes in college. This works.
Optimizing your study time by taking the "boring" work, e.g. building flashcards of material you organized yourself, cuts down on time spent not doing work that's maximally effective (memorizing flashcards).
If a person had infinite time, making flashcards would be just one more thing on an unbound list of things they could do to learn the material better. But people don't have infinite time, and considering you're already "familiar" with the material since you wrote and organized it, building flashcards is something you can't really afford to spend time on.
When I went back to school to get my undergrad, I focused on optimizing my time, because procrastination was a huge problem for me the first time around. Being efficient and not spending a single second longer than I have to in order to get an "A" is important to me, and using ChatGPT to help me with that has been wildly successful so far.
There is not necessarily a tradeoff here. Sure, you will make some errors, but if you find a card to be so bad that it's useless for SRS (unlikely, unless the answer is very vague or too long to quickly validate) you will just delete it and replace it with a better one.
That said, I still make all my cards myself and some cards are trivial. For the trivial cards, review time can outweigh creation time. But trivial cards take seconds.
Crafting effective prompts is important to getting the value out of an SRS. That sometimes is the bull of the "work". Not the review.