What's your experience with AI-Assisted flashcards?

Technology and Computers
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I’m currently knee deep in my business law exam prep, and so far have created around 2000 (german) Anki flashcards (averaging around 3 per page). I speed up the process by extracting the text in the textbook into a .txt file with my phone, but it still takes an awfully long time.

Considering this, what are your experiences with AI-assisted/generated cards? Are they worthwhile or just a distraction?

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I prefer to make atomic notes and store them in Obsidian. I create atomic notes with AI → search for places on the internet and create mental images to place in those places (whether formulas or other topics).

I use AI to understand topics that I find difficult to understand and to generate exercises that I then review with AI. I notice that many people use it to create flashcards, which is also fine; it reduces your workload from a certain point of view.

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It got me curious and I briefly tested jungleai.

  • You can give it a document or a link.
  • You can generate anki cards.
  • You can generate true/false, multiple choice or free answer questions,
  • You can read an overview of the subject and ask questions in a chat before taking the quizz (which is very useful).
  • All functions are heavily limited in the free version.

I tried to put in it :
« Cours de chimie générale » (pdf) : Questions were ok. Just many of them were exercise questions like « write this number in scientific notation », that I wouldn’t want to have as anki cards.

  • Great for studying, not for anki cards : you’d have to generate really tons of cards and then select questions to keep only the questions making you think about the whys and hows of the basic concepts. Which may take just as much time as creating them yourself ? (hard to quantify).
    Unfortunately, before the export to anki, you can only select themes, not the questions themselves. So you’ll have to export everything, then sort things out in anki.
  • The advantage may be that you’ll get questions you wouldn’t have thought asking yourself.

« Place cells: How your brain creates maps of abstract spaces (Youtube video) » : I found some of the questions’ formulation often too complicated. For example : « If an animal’s hippocampus treats the same physical chamber as a different context without any physical changes to the chamber, which environmental alteration most directly demonstrates that reclassification? »

  • I know the subject is complex, but I would find valuable to ask the questions in a simpler way, so that they are not harder to understand that the video itself. Sure it’s useful to make me think but I feel I spend more time thinking about what the sentence mean, before actually thinking about the ideas that would allow me to answer. One may argue that it’s the kind of questions you’d get in an exam, but I didn’t find that quizz enjoyable.
  • Not great for videos relying in visuals to explain complicated things.

A Ted talk of LeCunff about « Tiny Experiemnts » and another about life and the universe (didn’t save the links) : a few questions were good, but the interest (« philosophical aspect ») felt lost.

  • I don’t really care about questions like “which experiment did she do first?” (multiple choice). The basic concepts that she defines, it’s useful to get questions about. I feel that the AI is really bad at selecting between the information to remember and the fluff (fluff is useful, just not in flashcards)
    I suspect AI is good for technical things, and that what I take out of that kind of videos is very personal so no good results is probably not a surprise.
  • However, I did find the summary function useful to remember the contents of the video and bring the ideas to mind again without re-watching it.
  • When I listen to a ted talk about the universe to think about the meaning of life, I don’t actually want a physics/chemistry quizz. The questions turned repetitive.
    Again, the subject probably wasn’t appropriate.

A language video of the Comprehensible Japanese channel : great to see if you understood it and to repeat the vocab in writing.

  • Great for languages to have another activity to do, testing comprehension of video.
  • Not great to do anki cards (because I don’t actually care what kind of socks her husband likes and don’t want to be tested on that, I want an example sentence with audio)
  • So basically quite useful, but not for creating cards.

My conclusion : it’s probably good for technical subjects, and great for quizzes to study in an academic context. For language comprehension training it’s quite useful. But I’m not convinced that the card creation feature is a good use of that tool.

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If you understand something, you can answer questions about it without any problems, but if you don’t, well, that will be difficult… For example, if you are asked about a glass using Substance – What is its essence? For example, is it a man, a horse, or perhaps a house?

You cannot confuse a glass with a horse or a house.

There are systems that can be created to generate questions based on a topic you already understand. I use a list of questions to understand a topic in greater depth, since questions clarify the topic. It’s not something you should be memorizing questions and answers for.

Here is the list:

Is it? (Possibility or existence)

What is it? (Essence)

What is it made of? (Matter)

Why is it? (Cause)

How much is it? (Quantity)

What is it? (Quality)

When is it? (Time)

Where is it? (Place)

How is it? and What is it with? (Mode and means)

This is the list of questions I ask myself about a specific topic. It helps me delve deeper. I can use metaphors with created characters, in the form of questions and answers, as Bruno explains in one of his books. This is taken as an idea for the following:

First Question

Moeris: Of the many kinds of dogs I see, the others shall be passed over, and as that one which is biting is as such, properly Cynical, it is no less illustrative than was the pig: in what way can that cowardly dog hidden beneath a human figure be known?

Circe: It is of that barbarous kind, that condemns and shouts at what it doesn’t understand: as that sort of cowards in the shape of dogs bark in ignorance at all that are beneficial friends, and more mildly at dissolute and extremely vile acquaintances.

Try to answer questions based on your knowledge of the subject, rather than memorizing answers… for example, the hippocampus prioritizes information about places over any other type of information; in other words, it is a characteristic of the hippocampus that scenes linked to emotions are retained more intensely because the hippocampus has a direct connection to the amygdala, etc. When you start asking questions and answering them in a chain, your memory creates a kind of association that is just as effective as mental images. The only thing questions help you with is to clarify a topic that was unclear to you.

You can organize topics and generate questions for yourself, such as amygdala and hippocampus, right and left hemispheres, look for differences and similarities, etc. The topic will become clearer to you. It’s like a chain or series of questions, as if you were a curious child… You can use AI to understand the topic in depth.

For very abstract topics, use the memory palace, create visual metaphors in question and answer format, using characters.

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