How to use A.I. to get offline and get things done

A smarter way for parents (and kids!) to research anything

A few months back, my oldest hurt herself on the soccer field for the zillionth time. It was the last straw for my husband, and he decided to look into things we could do to help.

Last week, we took an impromptu trip to Disneyland. We hadn’t done a lick of planning for it. We were in the area and decided on a Tuesday night at dinner that we’d go Wednesday morning. With five kids. Of different age groups. And interests.

The research it took to figure these two things out would have taken I-don’t-even-know-how-long before the internet and hours of online research after the dawn of Google. But now, with generative A.I. at our fingertips, it took just minutes. Very few minutes. And the results were exactly what we needed.

How we did it

My husband went straight to ChatGPT with his initial search for solutions for the girl who plays so hard she doesn’t care what happens to her body.

It went on from there with other suggestions and what to do next. His plan was to start calling around to local martial arts centers and asking for information.

Me, ever the phone-call-avoider? I went back to A.I.

It went on to give me the two options that met my criteria, their complete class schedules, and contact information. With that, I was able to pick the closest one to us that worked with our other kids’ schedules and then make a much quicker, much more informed phone call to set up her free trial class.

If he’d had to spend hours googling fall prevention ideas, he probably would have gotten bored and moved on.

If I’d had to call around to multiple martial arts studios and talked at length with each of them about what we were looking for and what fit our schedule, I wouldn’t have even started.

Instead, we got the answers we needed and moved off the phone/computer and back into the real world.

For Disney, I had our big girls look up what rides they thought looked best at Disneyland while I got the little ones ready for bed. When I came down a few minutes later, I had them send me the list they created and went straight to ChatGPT.

I asked it for the best rides for a 4- and 5-year-old at Disneyland Park. It returned a list, and then I followed up with this.

A quick back-and-forth with A.I., and it gave me exactly what we asked for: a day-long itinerary for Disneyland customized to our exact family’s hopes and needs. No need to take time, stress, or worry over what to do and how to keep everyone happy. We offloaded that part of it and moved on with our night — again, off the phones/computers.

What that means for you

Maybe planning a trip to Disneyland is something you’d love to spend time on. Awesome! Go right ahead.

Maybe you don’t need to spend time researching and calling around to martial arts studios because you already know the best sensei in town. Sweet!

Maybe you’ve got a growing baby who you expected to be sleeping better by now and want to see a comparison of the most popular (and most effective!) sleep training methods used today and which one would fit best into your family’s lifestyle.

Maybe you’re looking for a new credit card and want to figure out which one has the perks and benefits that much up with your family’s habits and needs.

Maybe you’d like to figure out where the best volunteering opportunities are in your community for the specific causes you care about and the time crunch you’re dealing with in this season.

In the past month, ChatGPT and Google have both opened their Deep Research tools for free, meaning anyone can use them now. Even you.

Even your kids.

What that means for your school-aged kids

It means they need to learn how to do research without it, so when — not if — they do research with it, they can do so ethically, efficiently and effectively.

If your kids’ teachers aren’t doing in-class work that teaches them how to research, do it with them at home.

Yes, I realize how boring that sounds. But it doesn’t have to be.

In less than a minute, I just asked ChatGPT to give me two lists of ideas for students in kindergarten through 12th grade to look up using Deep Research. One for school. One for fun.

Of course, these are just examples, and you would use whatever is currently interesting to your kid(s).

Take the time this weekend to research a topic like this the old-fashioned way — like by using Google 😉. Talk about other ways to find out more. The library. Books around the house. Movies. Podcasts. Calling a friend or family member with expertise.

Then when you’re happy with the results, try out ChatGPT or Google’s Deep Research tool and see what it comes up with.

If your kids don’t know about tools like this already, they’ll hear any day now. So, you might as well be the one to tell them. To teach them.

TIP: Be specific.

Old-fashioned research starts very broad and then narrows by source.

But if you’re “talking to” something that knows everything that’s ever happened in the history of the world, you’ll need to get specific before you even begin.

AI expert, Mike Kaput, gives this example.

So, I took that screenshot, uploaded it to ChatGPT and asked it to use the advice to craft a Deep Research prompt for the school-based 11th grade example.

It asked if I wanted it to sound like it was written by a student or a teacher, and I chose student.

Here’s what it offered:

"I’m writing a paper for my U.S. History class on how major Supreme Court cases have changed American law. Can you help me research 3–5 landmark cases like Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona, or Marbury v. Madison?

I need to understand what each case was about, what the Court decided, and how those decisions affected the law or people’s rights.

It would be great if you could include:
– A quick summary of each case
– How it changed the Constitution or laws in practice
– Any big debates or arguments the justices had
– Real examples of how the case affected people later on

Please use trustworthy sources like government websites, educational resources (like Oyez.org), or articles by legal experts."

Since I know Deep Research takes a while, I left the computer and came back 30 minutes later to a completed 16-page, 6,794-word report responding to the prompt above.

Now what?

Is a kid going to read a 16-page research report? Even if it’s about something they love? Probably not.

Would they be able to turn it in for their homework assignment? Definitely not.

Even if they thought that was ethical — which you clearly have already explained is not — they still wouldn’t be able to turn it in.

The models we have today, the ones that are available to the public, even the non-paying public have reached PhD-level reasoning in several areas of expertise. But they can still make mistakes — just like humans do — and none of us (or our kids) have PhDs in everything. So, we can’t reliably fact-check the output quickly enough to make “cheating” worth it.

Then what can we do with it? Stay tuned for next week when I’ll explain the use cases for another Google tool: NotebookLM.