Allan Nascimento

AI and Learning

Hey everyone, this is Allan. I want to keep talking about the idea I started on yesterday’s video, where I shared a bit of the process of how I plan videos. I’ve structured the topics I want to discuss, and the core question is: are we actually getting smarter with AI, or just learning something superficially?

Reading vs Summaries

A Brazilian copywriter I follow on Instagram asked his audience why they would pay for a course or a teacher when AI can give them any information quickly and easily. That question got me thinking. Take a book like The Fellowship of the Ring. I read it years ago when I wasn’t even fluent in English, and the experience helped me learn the language. The book is over 500 pages, and even though some of those pages are notes, the point is that you can’t absorb the ideas from a ChatGPT summary. Understanding a book requires reading it in full.

Depth vs Shallow

Yesterday I mentioned that learning the lessons from 100 books by reading 100 summaries is a mistake. When you read a book you get the whole context, the author’s ideas, and repeated exposure that reinforces understanding. Authors repeat concepts not because they’re dumb, but because repetition and contact with the idea help you absorb it. A brief AI‑generated paragraph won’t stick; you’ll likely forget it tomorrow.

The real problem isn’t access to information, it’s filtering. We feel overwhelmed because we don’t know how to filter what we consume. As the copywriter said, some people will stay shallow, only getting surface‑level ideas, while others will use AI to dig deeper and gain insight.

Using AI Effectively

Consider Tom Bombadil from the same book. If you only watch the movies you never meet him, and his poetic speech is hard to grasp. I could use AI today to help me understand his language, not just to get a summary of who he is. That’s the difference between relying on AI for shallow ideas and using it to truly understand and absorb material. Quality beats quantity.

The question in the title, are you actually getting better with AI?, is about whether you use AI to finish tasks faster or to clarify parts you don’t understand. You can ask AI to generate questions, explain concepts in your own words, or give directions instead of plain answers. The tool is the same; it’s how we use it that matters.

Selective Consumption

My personal approach is to read one good book a month and supplement it with about ten podcasts that are AI‑generated summaries of other books. That balance lets me get depth from the primary book while still exposing myself to a broader range of ideas.

Be More Selective