Making Anki cards is arguably one of the slowest steps of the Anki studying process. However, you can create Anki cards with ChatGPT very quickly.
This short guide demonstrates how you can generate different types of Anki cards and how to mass-import these using ChatGPT. I’ll also show you all prompts I used so you can do it yourself. Lastly, I’ll go over some limitations of doing this.
Let’s first cover some of the benefits of generating Anki cards with ChatGPT.
Key Benefits of Creating Anki Cards with ChatGPT
Here are a few benefits of creating Anki cards in this way:
- Generating cards is extremely quick. This saves a lot of manual card creation time.
- You can personalize how difficult the cards that ChatGPT creates
- You can ask ChatGPT to generate creative Anki cards
However, it’s worth noting that this is just one way to create Anki cards faster, I have another article on how to make Anki cards faster where I show you some additional ways to create Anki cards that don’t have the downsides of this approach.
With that out of the way, let’s discuss how you can actually use ChatGPT to create Anki cards.
How to Create Anki Cards With ChatGPT
This is beyond a doubt the fastest way to create Anki cards I have discovered. This could literally generate hundreds of cards in minutes. I’ll explain later why this method might not be the best. But for now, let’s admire the speed.
Essentially you can prompt ChatGPT to generate cards in the text format that Anki uses to import basic cards. Yes, I’ve only managed to get the import feature working for basic cards right now.
But this should be fine since one of the main benefits of cloze cards is how fast they can be created anyways (I don’t see a lot of benefit to creating other card types in this way).
Let’s get into how you can generate Anki cards using my prompts in a ready-to-import format.
Step 1: Create Anki cards with ChatgPT cards using this custom prompt
Here’s the prompt I created that allows you to create a text file to mass import ChatGPT’s generated cards.
For inspiration, I used some of the examples of simple and specific questions from the 20 rules of learning by SuperMemo to teach ChatGPT what the output should look like.
Basic card prompt
Here is the prompt. For this, you can use either GPT 3.5 or GPT-4 successfully.
Create flashcards in this format according to the guielindes and examples based on the info below:
Format:
create anki flashcards in this format:
First the front of the card is written in plain text, Put a ; at the end. Then the answer is put after a space in quotes ” “. For example, Question; “Answer”.Guidelines:
- Make flashcards only on the most important information.
- Make sure the questions are clear and easy to understand
- Make the answers very concise and about a single concept or fact
Examples:
- Where is the Dead Sea located?; “on the border between Israel and Jordan”
- What is the lowest point on the Earth’s surface?; “The Dead Sea shoreline”
- What is the average level on which the Dead Sea is located?; “400 meters (below sea level)”
- How long is the Dead Sea?; “70 km”
Info:
[Information you want made into flashcards]
Here are the results after I used some paragraphs from the Wikipedia Psychology page. As you can see these cards come in ready-to-import format.
Now all that’s left is to actually import them. Luckily this is as simple as using Anki’s existing importing feature.
Step 2: Import your ChatGPT-generated Anki cards using a text file
Now that you have the generated cards, all you need to do is copy and paste the cards you want into a .txt file. Here is a quick reference on how to create a text file on both PC and Mac if you don’t know how to do this.
Here is what my text file looks like.
Now it’s just a case of importing the file you have created.
Use Anki’s built-in card import feature
- First, click “import” from Anki’s main menu.
2. Next, select the text file and click “open”.
3. Finally, after choosing the card type “basic” and the deck you want to add the cards to, click “Import”.
4. You’re done! Enjoy your new easily generated Anki cards.
What I have shown you so far is the most basic way to go about using ChatGPT for Anki cards. It’s what will work for 90% of the people out there. Keep reading if you want to learn bonus ways to create cloze cards and overlapping cards as well.
Bonus Ways to Prompt ChatGPT For Anki Cards
There are some alternative approaches to generating cards here that might interest you. In this section I’ll cover two bonus techniques, creating cloze cards and creating overlapping Anki cards.
Generate cloze cards with ChatGPT
You can also generate cloze cards using ChatGPT. This was one of the first things I experimented with.
You can pick and choose which cloze cards to include by simply copying and pasting the ones you want into a new cloze card in Anki.
The focus here is more on the actual ChatGPT prompt. If you need a more complete guide on how to create cloze cards, check out my article on how to create cloze cards in Anki.
Here is the cloze card promt. Once again I used SuperMemo’s article on the 20 rules for learning, this time using some of the simple cloze deletion questions adapted into Ankis cloze format.
Cloze card prompt
Create fill in the blank style flashcards in this format according to the guildlines and examples based on the info below:
Format:
The hidden part of the question is the answer. Right before the answer you put “{{c1::” with the answer comming right after. Right after the answer you put “}}” to signify the end of the answer portion. For example, Question with an {{c1::answer}} that has this format.Guidelines:
- Make flashcards only on the most important information.
- Make sure the questions are clear and easy to understand
- Make sure the answers are very concise and about a single concept or fact
Example flashcards:
- Kaleida was funded to the tune of {{c1::$40}} million by Apple Computer and IBM in 1991
- Kaleida was funded to the tune of $40 million by {{c1::Apple and IBM}} in 1991
- Kaleida was funded to the tune of $40 million by Apple Computer and IBM in {{c1::1991}}
- Kaleida’s mission was to create a {{c1::multimedia programming language}} It finally produced one, called Script X. But it took three years.
- Kaleida’s mission was to create a multimedia programming language. It finally produced one, called {{c1::Script X}} But it took three years
Info:
[Information you want made into flashcards]
From here you can just copy and paste the generated cloze cards into Anki.
That covers all of the generic card generation prompts. But there is another bonus way that you can change around these prompts. This can enhance topical coverage.
Generate overlapping Anki cards to cover the whole topic
Another way to use these prompts is to cover a single topic in more depth with multiple cards. That’s why I call these “overlapping Anki cards”.
You can rewrite the prompt so that in the info section you just give a single topic or concept. This way you can tackle concepts from many angles.
To create these, you can either paste in some information about a single concept or idea (recommended) or just put in the general topic.
Using a general topic draws more on ChatGPT’s existing training rather than feeding it something specific, which could lead to less targeted flashcards.
As far as prompt modification, here is the part of the basic prompt you need to modify. This modification can be applied to either the basic card prompt or the cloze card prompt.
Info:
The topic [your topic here]
The advantages here are that you can target something very specific and from multiple angles. Use this sparingly though because it created a lot of cards, and therefore revision work.
That pretty much covers how you can use ChatGPT to create Anki cards. But, there are some downsides that I will briefly discuss at the end here that you should keep in mind.
The Caveat of Using ChatGPT to Generate Anki Cards
While this is great at creating an insane amount of cards very quickly, it’s important to realize that this isn’t always what you might want.
The more cards you generate the more work you create for yourself.
On top of this, these cards are not likely going to be personalized to you, ChatGPT might generate tons of cards that you already know the answers to. It just can’t read your mind about what already know, at least not yet, and hopefully, it never gets there.
You can, however, control the information you feed into ChatGPT. This does allow you to cut unnecessary Anki cards to a degree, but there is still a lot of flexibility lost to using ChatGPT to create your cards.
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