Three years on from the release of ChatGPT, two broad camps have formed: those people who refuse to use it, and those who use it every day.
A 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center found that one-third of US adults say they have been using ChatGPT. This includes 58% of US adults under 30 – roughly double the share two years ago.
Experts say the emerging divide – between those who may already be deeply invested in AI, and those who are refusing to engage with it – makes it increasingly important to have an open conversation about how best to use it.
So how should we approach AI tools? Here is a step-by-step guide informed by experts.
Brainstorming ideas
Knowing when to use AI can be daunting if you’re not already familiar with what it’s able to do. You can start by simply asking it for help with what is already on your mind, or outstanding on your to-do list.
Timothy B Lee, author of the Understanding AI newsletter, recommends using AI tools to brainstorm and break down tasks or projects into achievable steps. “Any time you’re trying to come up with ideas, it’s a good starting place,” he says.
Catherine Goetze, a content creator and AI educator who goes by @askcatgpt on TikTok, suggests thinking of it as a “thought partner”, helping to bounce around ideas, break through creative blocks or refine your thinking. But it’s important that, in reviewing the results, you continue to draw on your own judgment, expertise and taste, rather than letting the AI have the final say. The best tasks for AI are those “where you know what the right answer looks like”, she says.
Researching projects
For more complex or intensive research, an AI tool can give you a rundown of what has been published. “Think about it as similar to Wikipedia,” Lee says. “We know it’s fallible, and we know how to check citations.”
Tools such as Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity all offer some variation of a “deep research” feature. This will scour documents on your topic and summarize them in a report of a few thousand words. The bot will even ask you clarifying questions so as to assemble the most relevant results.
“It’s really astonishingly good,” Lee says. Its responses will provide primary sources and links, enabling you to refer to them yourself. Lee says the deep research function is helpful for “getting a lay of the land” – identifying key papers to read, questions to answer and next steps for your project.
That’s the important bit, experts agree: after using an AI tool for preliminary orientation, you still need to do the actual work yourself.
Learning new skills or hobbies
You can also use AI “when it allows you to expand your world”, says Ella Hafermalz, an associate professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who studies generative AI’s impact on work.
Hafermalz has been using it for help with growing a mini lotus flower, as well as learning the basics of investing in stocks and even sparking ideas for what to make for dinner.
She says its benefit is “getting you off the ground” with a new interest, activity, hobby or skill, particularly those that have a high barrier to entry.
“For many people, the hurdle in trying a new thing is embarrassment, fear, time, discomfort, not even knowing what you need to know,” she says.
Back-and-forthing with the AI can break down those barriers, and “get you to that next step”, Hafermalz says. But, again, it’s best treated as a starting point for tasks that are perhaps lower stakes and where you remain the ultimate authority.
Organizing information
Once you’ve got started with your research project, AI tools can help you structure your findings, such as by identifying themes, answering questions, or generating timelines or summaries.
If research is your priority, Hafermalz recommends using Google’s free-to-use application NotebookLM, which draws only from documents, notes and materials you’ve uploaded, rather than the entirety of the web.
Historians are now using NotebookLM as a research assistant, Hafermalz says. She continued: “It acts as an organizer … If you’re trying to organize information and synthesize things, and you don’t want it to go off-piste and pull things from Reddit, NotebookLM is a more contained space.”
For personal use, AI can function like a domestic helper or an executive assistant, helping you to plan meals or workouts, create a budget or structure your afternoon from high- to low-priority tasks.
How to get better results
A year or so ago, crafting the prompt was important to getting the best out of an AI tool, but “it’s getting less and less important over time”, Lee says.
However, there are still certain things you can do to get the most out of them.
You can now trust the leading AI tools to respond more intuitively, and to more casual language and phrasing – though context helps, Lee adds: “The more information you give it, the more likely you are to get a good result.”
Goetze encourages people to throw out the idea of prompting altogether. “You really want to think about it as chatting,” Goetze says. “The magic actually comes from the back-and-forth.” That is ChatGPT’s advantage over Google search, after all, she adds: “What I would say is go into it and just ramble.”
So long as you’re careful to avoid sharing sensitive information, you can also link to websites and upload PDFs and other material for it to refer to in its answer. For example, you could share your new phone contract and ask the AI to flag terms you should be aware of or potential opportunities to make savings.
If you’re ever stuck on something you can also do something called a “reverse-prompt”. When Goetze recently hit a mental block with a document she was working on, she asked ChatGPT to come up with five questions that would help her push past it. “They prompted me to reflect in slightly different ways,” she says.
It’s essential to check all of your AI responses. While they are improving every day, they still need to be checked against primary and reputable sources, the experts agree. Not only can it regurgitate falsehoods and misinformation, the model can actively make things up – what’s known as a “hallucination”.
Goetze says: “Check your sources, check those links, check the dates of the sources.”
It is also possible to use AI in ways that shrink our world, undermine our abilities and even our humanity. Often, they stem from treating it as a shortcut, or the final stage in a process, rather than a first step.
Goetze uses ChatGPT to help her come up with ideas for content, but if she were to prompt it to write scripts that she then read verbatim, she says, “that would be me totally using it as a crutch, and it hindering my creative ability”.
All three experts agree that it will become harder to parse what parts (or proportion) of a text were written, and which were AI-generated. For now, Goetze says, “you should aim to be transparent”, and take care to avoid plagiarism and breaches of copyright.
Another potential danger is overinvesting in an AI tool’s responses and even becoming reliant. “You don’t want to stay in a feedback loop with AI – you will end up in dark places,” Hafermalz says.
She recommends setting a clear goal or intention every time you use ChatGPT, and slowly upping the stakes of your engagement so that you always remain in charge.
“It shouldn’t be a prison that holds you in, it should be a stepping stone – a way to get out, and do other things,” Hafermalz says. “Use it where you can verify it yourself, in the real world.”
