Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT have been hailed as both a revolutionary resource and an apocalypse for education. Among graduate and doctoral students around me—and in my own everyday learning as a researcher—I see both futures playing out. How to use these tools to support learning as a budding researcher, rather than de-skill ourselves? This post reminds us that the doctoral journey is a learning journey and highlights a key aspect of any learning process, along with different ways we can engage in it. Then, I draw on research-based ideas to outline (tentative) principles for learning effectively with (or without) these AI tools.

Have you ever wished for advice from this blog, tailored to your specific questions or situation? For getting a tl;dr of our blog posts on a certain topic? For an “A Happy PhD” podcast? In this post, I detail step-by-step an easy way of using AI to get information and advice tailored to your questions, about the blog’s very topics and contents.

We know that making progress is a critical motivational factor in finishing a PhD and maintaining good mental health while we do it. In turn, our productivity plays a big role in whether we make progress on our dissertation or not. As the first post in a series on doctoral productivity, I could not help but fall into one of the thèmes du jour: whether ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence (AI) tools can write a good piece about this topic. In this post, I go over a couple of iterations of (pretty good) computationally-generated advice, and finally give you a few ideas that I think are overlooked by the algorithm.