Your Brain's New Superpower: How to Automate Spacious Repetition Flashcards with an LLM
Hey everyone, hope you're doing well. I want to talk about something that's been a total game-changer for me lately: using AI to create flashcards. I know, it sounds a little nerdy, but hear me out. If you're into learning new things, whether it's for school, work, or just for fun, you've probably heard of spaced repetition. It's this super effective way to remember stuff long-term. But here's the thing... making the flashcards yourself can be a HUGE pain. Turns out, we can now offload that boring part to an AI, & it's pretty amazing.
I've been a fan of spaced repetition systems (SRS) like Anki for over a decade. The whole idea is that you review information at increasing intervals, right when you're about to forget it. It's based on solid science about how our memory works, specifically the "forgetting curve" discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus way back in the day. The system is designed to flatten that curve, so you can remember more with less effort. Pretty cool, right?
But here's the dirty little secret of SRS: the biggest hurdle isn't reviewing the cards, it's creating them. The common wisdom is that making your own cards is part of the learning process. & while that's true to some extent, it's not always the most efficient use of your time. Think about it: you have to read a text, pick out the important bits, rephrase them into a question & answer format, & then manually type them into your SRS. One article I read put it perfectly: if it takes you 90 seconds to create a card, but only a total of 90 seconds to review it over the next five years, is the creation process really worth all that time? Honestly, for me, the answer is often no.
That's where Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 come in. These are the same kind of AI that power chatbots & other cool new tech. & it turns out, they're REALLY good at reading a piece of text & turning it into a set of high-quality flashcards. This means you can take a chapter from a textbook, a long article, or even a scientific paper & have a ready-to-study Anki deck in minutes, not hours. This is a HUGE deal for anyone who wants to learn more efficiently.
So, let's dive into how you can actually do this.
The "Why" Behind Automating Your Flashcards
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let's talk a bit more about why this is such a big deal. The main reason, as I mentioned, is time. I read a great analysis that broke it down like this: creating a good flashcard involves summarizing & filtering information, which are actually not the most effective learning techniques compared to active recall (the core of SRS). So, you're spending a lot of time on a relatively low-value part of the process.
Think about it this way: last year, I wanted to brush up on my French. I could have spent weeks making my own vocabulary cards, or I could download a pre-made deck. I chose a popular public deck, & while it wasn't perfect, it got me 95% of the way there. I just had to make a few tweaks here & there. The time I saved was MASSIVE.
Automating flashcard creation with an LLM gives you the best of both worlds. You get the customization of making your own cards, but with the speed of using a pre-made deck. You can feed the AI any text you want to learn, & it will create a deck tailored to that specific material. It's like having a personal assistant whose only job is to create study materials for you.
How to Create Flashcards Automatically: A Step-by-Step Guide
Alright, let's get to the fun part. How do you actually do this? The basic process is pretty simple, but the key to getting good results is in the details, especially the prompt you use.
Here’s a general workflow that I've found works well:
Choose Your Text: This can be anything you want to learn. A blog post, a chapter from an ebook, a transcript of a lecture, or even a scientific paper. For this to work well, the text should be digital so you can copy & paste it.
Choose Your LLM: GPT-4 is widely considered the best for this task right now. It's better at understanding context & following instructions than its predecessors. GPT-3.5 can also work, but it's more likely to make mistakes or ignore parts of your prompt. There are also open-source options, but for now, GPT-4 is the king.
Craft Your Prompt: This is the MOST important step. A good prompt will give you well-formatted, concise, & useful flashcards. A bad prompt will give you a mess. Here's a template that I've adapted from a great post on LessWrong, which has worked wonders for me:
Create