Recall in the Age of AI
Written April 2026
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The Shortcut Problem
It's largely believed that AI is hurting schooling by lowering the barrier to cheating. This tempting shortcut can inhibit a student's compulsion to learn. Of course, this is not limited to students. Anyone can fall for the shortcut of offloading some thinking or work to chat (a colloquial term for chatgpt). One must balance the usefulness of AI with the reality that you may be trading long term skills for quick results now. A specific source of tension for me is the need for organic, human-powered recall.
The reality that people offload recall is not new. We have books, dictionaries, and search engines. But I believe AI has a unique set of advantages that allow one to offload some retention but also to encourage internalized recall. With unparalleled access to information, you should leverage expansive knowledge to improve your own mind by retaining it. How can one use the infinite word machine to retain and recall in an age of offloading thought?
Why Retention Matters
Retention and recall improve the quality of one's life and mind by enabling insights and deeper relationships. Retention is the backbone of decision making. Without internalizing information, you cannot understand and navigate the world properly.
Take the retention of history. How can someone understand the reality, depravity, and dynamics of war without a knowledge of the patterns humanity falls into? Learning and ingesting history allows you to interpret the world with its context and prior examples. This knowledge cannot be offloaded because it reorients your understanding of the world. You intrinsically take in new information based on the foundation of a worldview within your own mind. Before you even have a chance to look up more details, your mind begins to incorporate what you hear through the corpus of what you remember. In some ways, it is too late and some part of clear judgement is lost. The backbone of wisdom comes from knowing and understanding the things of the past. Therefore, without recall wisdom is almost impossible.
Recall in Relationships
In a less academic sense, recall enables deeper relationships through thoughtful moments and intention. Think about the last time someone asked about your niche interest or a topic you brought up the other day. That warm feeling that makes you feel seen or understood just because someone else thought of you. AI does not directly inhibit your ability to be thoughtful. But in a noisy world where the recall skill is less tested, I believe thoughtfulness will decline along with it. Through business and a low need to internalize facts and figures in every day life, I've felt myself deprioritize memory as a skill. And I'm tired of it. Through memory practice and slowing down, I'm hoping to improve my recall and be more intentional in my relationships.
Search Deja Vu
No doubt, technology, search, and AI reduce the immediate need for recall at times. Searching up a niche technical process at work can be totally streamlined with AI. For me, that often looks like a quick search for the right command to accomplish something for debugging or programming. AI has made getting that info way easier than even Google had years ago.
But there is a point where offloading those commands takes its toll, and I find myself searching for how to do the same thing multiple times. A search deja vu of sorts. At that point I reflect. I think that in a rush to get something done, it's easy to forget to take in everything and treat it as a proper learning opportunity.
AI for Personalized, Quick Studying
Practically, one of my favorite ways to utilize AI has been to make simple flash cards. Recently, I went on a trip to beautiful, arid Morocco. I wanted to learn a bit of the local language to interact with people and foster a bit more connection on my trip. However, Morocco, broadly influenced by a diverse set of ethnicities over history, speaks a niche dialect of Arabic called Darija. It's much less commonly supported by standard language learning tools.
Luckily, at the airport, I was able to ask Claude to make me a tourist Darija set of Anki flash cards. Claude proceeded to generate 40 flash cards for greetings, directions, dining, and shopping. At first Claude gave me a text version of the flashcards. Anki only imports from a nonstandard file format that you're meant to build on your desktop. So I asked Claude to do it for me. Claude converted the text file into the Anki format by writing a python script and running it in the cloud. It was painless, and allowed me to spend three hours of my flight doing flashcards for Darija. This led to some fun interactions with street vendors and friendly Moroccans when I could say hello in their native language. AI allowed me to rapidly build some memory tools that I would not have otherwise had access to.
AI for Daily Details
As a way to test my recall and increase my general knowledge, I resolved to make a daily trivia game. I love trivia. It's approachable for almost all people. You can compete and learn along the way.
The tricky part of making a trivia game is that you have to know the trivia beforehand, write the questions, categorize them, and select their difficulty. This is no fun, because if I make the trivia, then I can't play. Luckily, AI is great at widely documented aggregate human knowledge, types faster than me, and can give fuzzy human-like categories to things. This set of problems seemed like a perfect application of AI. You can guide the AI to any topic and go considerably deep before it stops being reliable.
I made a daily game, like Wordle, sharable and approachable. It has 3 categories with 3 questions of increasing difficulty. So every day there is a little set of 9 trivia questions across a variety of categories to perk your curiosity and test your knowledge. I hope you enjoy playing it and learn a thing or two.
Verdict
In a world where knowledge is just one click away, it's hard to feel like it needs to be closer. But AI equips us with even more tools to educate and improve our own minds, if we choose to use them so. I hope you find ways to encourage recall. Make quizzes for yourself. Learn new things. And pursue knowledge.