Have you ever had something you’re obsessed with and wished someone in your life was equally obsessed so you could talk about it? Or maybe not even obsessed, but just something you were enjoying that you wish you could share? That’s me and books. While many of my friends are readers and we do have some overlapping taste, the majority of the works I read aren’t being read by my friends. And though I am in a book club at my library, that’s only one book a month.
Enter: AI. AI is knowledgeable about everything. AI never gets tired of talking. AI is there when you want it, and gone when you don’t. Today I’m going to give you step-by-step instructions on how to use AI to get deep on a topic of interest, how to help yourself think and reflect more deeply, and you’ll see that this is not a scary, Her-like situation.
Building Your Tool
As I shared in my post about organizing your AI interactions, I have extensive experience with Gemini as a Googler and it’s the AI tool I pay for and use in my personal life as well. So everything I talk about here will be through the lens of building with Gemini, but most major AI tools have similar capabilities today.
When you want to have recurring conversations that follow a similar flow, I highly recommend creating a Gem. A Gem gives you the ability to teach your AI tool how you want it to engage with you, the type of questions you want it to ask, and the ultimate goal and output of the conversation.
I essentially wanted to create my own one-person book club, but I also wanted help synthesizing my thoughts and structuring them for a book review (all of my reviews can be found in the Reading section on the blog and are easily searchable on my Goodreads). A Gem is a perfect candidate for this type of interaction since it can handle generating discussion questions and identifying themes in my responses.
Step 1
I started by having a few Gemini chat conversations about recent books I was reading, then I asked Gemini to put together instructions for me to replicate this type of interaction in a Gem. This is my favorite hack: don’t try to create instructions by yourself from scratch. Show Gemini what you want it to do, then ask it to create instructions that would make what just happened repeatable.
Step 2
Then I took a look at my previous book reviews and identified how I like to structure them and how I define the “themes” I prefer to write about. This gave the Gem guidance on what a useful outline is for me. If you’re interested, it’s overall impression, key strengths, key weaknesses, specific analysis, conclusion/recommendation.
Step 3
Finally, I defined the modes I wanted it to operate in. First, I wanted it to be the moderator of the book discussion, so I gave it the job of asking me thought-provoking questions about the book and asking follow-up questions based on my answers. Second, I wanted it to transition into the review outline structuring. By giving it clear goals, I’m able to have one continuous conversation and get all of the interaction I’m looking for. I also like to write a short summary of my thoughts in my journal (much shorter than my book reviews), so the Gem pulls out the most enlightening points from the discussion for me to reflect on.
Using AI to help you think more deeply
I’ve continued to make it clear that I love using AI for my work and personal life, but this is not to give me the answers. It’s to help me think of answers to questions that hadn’t occurred to me. The true power of AI for me has been the ability to dig deeper and deeper into my thoughts and topics with an always-on, always-willing partner.
For my book club and review Gem, I start by sharing the title of the book and I uploaded pictures of the quotes and reflections I’ve written down in my commonplace book while I was reading. From here, the Gem asks me questions that are not just general discussion questions, but that are tailored to my notes. Once I answer, it asks follow-up questions and I end up thinking more critically about the book than I would have on my own. It’s like a friend and teacher in one.
If you create a Gem for your topic of interest, I recommend always giving your initial thoughts and also consider instructing it to ask follow up questions and to challenge your answers. It makes for a lively discussion!
What is a topic you wish you could talk more about in your everyday life?
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