AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brain With AI, Don’t Weaken it.

AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brainpower With AI, Don’t Weaken It.

In a previous post, Afraid of Being Replaced by AI? we looked at research on the physical differences human brains have with AI neural networks. It revealed unique capabilities our brains have over AI.

My next post presented a cognitive training plan for mid-career professionals to use AI in ways that strengthen their irreplaceable human capabilities, not weaken them. In this post, we’ll look at ways students can use AI to strengthen their fight against AI for jobs.

AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brainpower With AI, Don’t Weaken it.

Reports indicate that AI is disrupting the entry-level job market for college students. With recent articles predicting a broken career ladder and some saying an AI job apocalypse may already be here. While much is out of your control, there are things you can do to prepare. It takes a growth mindset and thinking past today’s assignment and grade.

It’s no secret AI provides easy, tempting ways to complete assignments. But the way you learn matters as much as the degree you receive. Think past today and focus on what will be best at graduation.

We can only leverage the unique capabilities of our human brains if we use and train them. Your goal in college isn’t to get an A. It’s to build a mind that’s sharp, adaptable, and creative within a discipline.

If you let AI lift the “cognitive weights,” you won’t build brainpower. This doesn’t mean avoid AI altogether. A savvy student will use it as a personal trainer to push, challenge, and help them achieve new levels of expertise. Here’s how to use AI in ways that accentuate not replace your unique human skills.

1. Reading & Research: AI as Guide & Tutor

Cognitive Workout: The struggle of reading a dense, difficult text and connecting its ideas to what you already know. This builds the rich, “messy” web of knowledge that creates insight.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): “Summarize this 35-page chapter for me.” You get the facts but skip the workout of critical reading and synthesis.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Use AI as a Tour Guide (Before Reading): “I’m about to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. What are the 3-5 core concepts I should look for? Define terms like ‘invisible hand’ and ‘division of labor’ for me.”
  • Use AI as a Tutor (During Reading): When you hit a wall, don’t give up. Ask for help. “Can you explain this specific paragraph in simpler terms? I’m confused about the concept of ‘fiat currency’.”
  • Use AI as a Quizmaster (After Reading): To check your own understanding, prompt: “Ask me five challenging questions about free-market philosophy. Don’t give me the answers until I try first.”

Result: AI helps you prepare to navigate the difficult terrain of learning, but you’re still the one thinkingh. You build the mental muscle of critical reading and information synthesis essential for knowledge-based careers.

2. Lectures & Notetaking: AI as Study Partner

Cognitive Workout: The act of listening, filtering what’s important, and synthesizing it into your own handwritten notes. This hardwires concepts into your memory through embodied cognition.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): Using an AI generated transcript as a substitute for taking your own notes. You become a passive recorder, not an active learner.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Take Your Own Notes First: When you know AI’s not recording everything you’re more motivated to pay attention in the moment. The act of writing and drawing connections is core to learning.
  • Use AI to Enhance Your Notes: After class, use AI to improve what you’ve already created. “Here are my messy notes from the lecture. Can you help me organize them into a clean outline for a study guide?”
  • Use AI for Gap Analysis: “Here are the slides, lecture notes, study guide, and my notes. What key topics from the professor’s resources did I miss or cover sparingly?”

Result: You get the full cognitive benefit of live synthesis. Then, AI acts as a study partner, helping you organize, review, and spot weaknesses in your understanding. This can supplement a professor’s or TA’s office hours with a 24/7 tutor trained on your specific class.

3. Class Participation: AI as Private Debate Coach

Cognitive Workout: Articulating a half-formed idea, thinking on your feet, and responding to challenges from professors and peers. This builds mental agility, plus skills and practice in persuasive communication.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): Staying silent in class because you can ask AI for the “perfect” answer later, avoiding all risk.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Use AI as a Sparring Partner: Before class, prepare for the debate. “I want to argue that the movie The Wolf of Wall Street fails to capture the nuances of the main character’s motivations in Jordan Belfort’s memoir. Act as someone who disagrees to challenge my position with counterarguments.”
  • Use AI for Perspective-Taking: “I need to understand the ‘utilitarian’ ethical framework for my business ethics class. Explain it to me as a non-expert and then give a real-world scenario where it would conflict with ‘virtue ethics.'”

Result: You enter class discussion better prepared, more confident, and with a deeper understanding of multiple viewpoints. AI helps you build mental resilience to respond in unpredictable, live human debates. You build soft skills with your discipline’s hard skills.

4. Writing & Assignments: AI as A Sounding Board & Editor

Cognitive Workout: The struggle of starting with a blank page and building your own structured, logical, and original argument. This is a mental workout for causal and abstract reasoning skills.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): “Write an essay about the impact of social media on teenage mental health.” You get a paper, but don’t gain experience in learning how to think. It can also be academic dishonesty if you turn it in unchanged as your own work.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Use it as an Idea Generator: “I’m writing about the 2007-8 financial crisis. Suggest 10 non-obvious research questions I could explore beyond the typical narrative.”
  • Use it as an Outline Critic: After you create your own outline, ask for feedback. “Here’s my thesis and main points. Is it a logical flow? What’s the weakest argument?”
  • Use it as a “Rubber Duck“: When a paragraph feels clunky, paste it in and ask: “What am I trying to say here? Help me rephrase this for clarity.”
  • Use it as an Editor: After you’ve done the hard work, let it polish your creation. “Check this for grammatical errors, awkward phrasing, and inconsistent tone.” But don’t let AI replace your tone! Remember to maintain your unique voice.

Result: You maintain ownership of the core intellectual work: the research, the thinking, and the creation of the argument. AI serves as a collaborator that helps you brainstorm, test your logic, and polish your final product to make your own work even better.

AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brainpower With AI, Don’t Weaken It. A summary workout reminder on how to be more human as a student training for an AI saturated job market. Click on image to download a PDF.

With any AI use, keep in mind that you’re responsible for the final output. Fact-check all results. Even the best reasoning and deep research models hallucinate making up research, stats, and references. Also, check your university and professor’s AI use policies to avoid plagiarism. Follow university, professor and internship employer guidelines on data privacy and uploading copyrighted, sensitive, or proprietary material.

These are just a couple examples for these use cases. Review the AI Prompt Framework for more guidance on how to craft prompts that perform well. For more details on how AI can help or harm your learning, see the post and infographic that shows how AI Can Skip the Stages of the Cognitive Learning Process. See this post for a look at How AI Agents May Impact Marketing Jobs and this post for how you can prepare with AI Vibe Marketing.

This Was 75% Human Generated Content! 

The initial ideas were my own, so were beginning parts of a rough draft. I used Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking for my research. I got better results when I asked the model to respond to my prompt again after running 10 miles. Thanks to Christopher Penn for his “Add a Banana” AI principle. That’s what helped send me in this training your brain direction which draws from my personal experience training for marathons. I added my own support articles, perspective on examples, and wrote in my own voice. Gemini 2.0 Flash generated the brain lifting weights graphic.

Why AI Flattery Fails: Curiosity and Critique Drive True Human-AI Innovation.

Years ago, a boss called me into his office and said, “You’re doing the best work in the agency. Your campaigns are exceeding results, winning creative awards and you deliver on every challenging project, but … you suck at presentations.” Ouch!

Who wouldn’t love to hear the first part, but the second? While it hurt, I was grateful because with the critique came an invitation to improve. I was curious enough to want to learn and found a Dale Carnegie High Impact Presentations course. I spent three days learning, being videotaped, and watching back in a hotel conference room full of strangers critiquing me.

From there, presenting was a strength. I would lead high-stakes presentations for clients and new business pitches. Today, I rely on those skills every week in the classroom as a professor.

In my career, most advancements came from critique and curiosity. I needed colleagues and mentors as thinking partners, not people pleasers. Used correctly AI can serve that role.

Last week ChatGPT-4o was updated to improve its personality, but the result was a people pleasing sycophant that loved everyone’s ideas including validating flat earth theory and recommending investing $30K in a “poop on a stick” product idea. -Image generated via prompt from Gemini Flash 2.0 Image Generator in Google AI Studio.

Flattery Will Get You Nowhere.

AI expert Ethan Mollick’s latest Substack “Personality and Persuasion” discussed how a small tweak in ChatGPT-4o drew attention because the LLM became eager to please users with agreement and flattery. Mollick and others said AI became a sycophant and everyone’s biggest fan.

AI with a pleasing personality isn’t a bad idea, but it is when responses skew overly supportive and disingenuous. Beebom reports that the ChatGPT update agreed to almost anything. One user received validation for the flat Earth theory. A Redditor shared a screengrab of how ChatGPT told him “poop on a stick” was a brilliant new product idea and he should invest $30K on it!

What’s wrong with fake flattery? AI or human sycophants insincerely praise to get reward. Thus, their feedback is distorted. Only hearing praise, not honest input, leads to poor decisions, mistakes, and maintaining the status quo when change is needed. It discourages fresh ideas, critical thinking, and stifles innovation.

A reason big companies become less innovative is that people become afraid to question current standards, the way things are done, and the boss. That’s fine if the environment the business was created in never changed, but markets change constantly. Businesses that don’t adapt fail to upstarts not afraid to ask, “Why?” and “Why not?” Remember Blockbuster before Netflix?

Lack of innovation can also come from focus on short-term customer, client, boss satisfaction. Customers and clients often don’t know what’s best. In aiming to please them you end up delivering worse results, not better. Aren’t you the expert? OpenAI arose from challenging convention, but in a twist, they created a sycophant focused on conventional customer satisfaction surveys. Appeasement can be a form of fake flattery.

The Problem With User Satisfaction.

The GPT-4o update was to “improve intelligence and personality” based on user feedback. But OpenAI said, “… in this update, we focused too much on short-term feedback … as a result, GPT-4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.“ ChatGPT’s default personality became too sycophantic.

This unexpected result is a good reminder that generative AI is still an experiment, and we’re the participants. LLM developers often don’t know why generative AI models do what they do. Unlike traditional coding, they guide results with reward mechanisms.

This reminds me of an attempt to improve healthcare that led to a focus on making people happy, rather than making them well. Alexandra Robbins reported that when Department of Health administrators based 30% of Medicare reimbursement on patient satisfaction scores, the most satisfied patients were significantly more likely to be hospitalized than less satisfied patients. And the most satisfied were more likely to die in the next four years!

In my marketing advertising career, giving clients what they wanted, ads that talked about the product, not the customer, and looked like competitors’ ads didn’t lead to the best results. The best ideas stood out as different and were the hardest to get approved – why I needed presentation skills! They didn’t do things the way they’ve always been done, asking “Why?” and “Why not?”

AI As Co-Thinker, Not People Pleaser.

In my last two posts on AI Agents and Vibe Marketing, I’ve been using AI more in my process. In working on this post, I did research on my own but also relied on discussions with ChatGPT as a thinking partner as I asked questions, clarified definitions, and researched more deeply.

I found AI co-thinking is very good at helping me see patterns between seemingly diverse subjects and disciplines. As Paul Roetzer said in The Artificial Intelligence Show, LLMs can’t create something new. AI can connect dots but can’t invent. Yet in working with a human like me, I can prompt it into new directions. My conversations with ChatGPT did just that inventing a new AI framework.

Here was my prompt thought process:

  • What is a sycophant?
  • Are sycophants good for organizations and society?
  • What are good ways to use AI to buffer against sycophantic thinking?
  • How can this stifle or encourage curiosity?
  • ChatGPT asked me, “Would you like a framework or checklist for using AI in ways that protect curiosity and intellectual integrity?” I said, “Yes.”
  • It gave me a rough framework. I asked, “Where did you get this AI & Curiosity framework?
  • It said, “I created the AI & Curiosity Framework specifically for your question–it’s an original synthesis drawing on best practices from critical thinking pedagogy, AI-human collaboration principles, group dynamics research, and practical patterns from how AI tools are being used in education, leadership, and decision-making.”
  • I took that rough framework, tweaked it and created the template you see below.

This is an example of “vibe thinking,” where AI enabled me to research, learn, and iterate my thoughts quickly, leading to this AI Curiosity & Critique Framework.

Click to download a PDF of this AI Curiosity & Critique framework.

 

AI Curiosity & Critique Framework

This AI framework will help you go beyond avoiding sycophant AI that stifles innovation to using AI to augment thinking to increase and speed up innovation. Don’t take a passive role in AI use. Follow the ACTIVE framework to expand creative exploration, challenge assumptions, and make strategic decisions free of marketing echo chambers.

Ask divergent questions, brainstorming unexpected campaign angles, and prompt for contra views or audience reactions, such as “What would Gen Z hate about this campaign?” Challenge assumptions, having AI critique messaging and target persona, or uncover untested assumptions, such as “Is our messaging convincing to a skeptical Millennial parent?” Track diverse inputs by testing perspectives and how different demographics may interpret messages, such as “How would this headline sound to a retired Baby Boomer in the South?”

Invite dissenting viewpoints, consider alternative views before implementation, and consider potential backlash, such as “Generate critical responses to this campaign from activists.” Validate Don’t Venerate taking AI at face value. Test with real people, verify facts and recommendations, such as “Where did you get this information? Provide a source.” Embed inquiry into the process using AI for ideation, postmortems, and customer empathy checks, such as “Simulate skeptical customer reaction to our ad.”

AI For Safe Explorations In Learning

Using AI for curiosity and critique, not to provide answers, can improve learning. It creates a safe place for exploration and a low-stakes environment to test ideas. It’s an easy place to ask questions students might not be comfortable asking in public.

I’ve had great success with this in my Digital Marketing class using NotebookLM as an AI tutor. Students ask as many questions as they want of my text and online resources – things they may not feel comfortable asking in class or me. They can test their wildest out-of-the-box ideas. Improved understanding of concepts and performance on assignments has been notable.

Whether you’re a marketing professional or professor, this AI framework will help you get somewhere flattery alone will not. Instead of AI first, it’s an example of an AI forward mindset where AI is used to improve human work, not replace it. If there’s something you suck at AI can help – even presenting.

This Post Was 90% Human Written. I used ChatGPT to research and explore topics while iterating and testing my thoughts to quickly pull together the diverse topics that helped me create this AI Framework. I tweaked the suggested framework, and the main writing was my own. I used ChatGPT to optimize my headline for SEO and engagement.