Oct. 11, 2026

Asking AI to give you the answer is the worst idea you’ve ever had.

But using AI as your personalized tutor, drawing specifically from high-quality source materials, is the future of learning.

In this video, I demonstrate how to create a custom Gem (using Google Gemini) for statistics tutoring, using my own course materials as the reference material it draws from.

Then I try (and repeatedly fail) to “jailbreak” it to make it give me an answer key or sample walkthrough for a homework assignment.

Why do this? Why not just open any chatbot application, like ChatGPT.com or Claude.ai and work with that?

That approach isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s the most unsophisticated version of this. And if you’re a student in my class, the output is often going to get you a bad score on the assignment.

It’s a common misconception that in statistics and data analytics there are “right answers.” This comes from the fact that it’s a field of applied math, and typically math has right answers.

But the reality is that there’s an incredible amount of subjective judgment involved in real-world statistical analysis. That means AI can’t give you “THE” correct procedure.

LLMs are essentially the distilled voice of the Internet, and that includes quite a bit of incorrect information and bad advice.

We can somewhat overcome this limitation by using custom LLMs, which draw primarily from source materials of our own choosing.

My custom AI Stats Tutor may not be as good an educator as I am, but it’s the next best thing (for my particular class).

And unlike me, it doesn’t need to sleep, meaning my students can query it day or night and get instant responses!

As with any technology, there’s incredible potential here, if it’s used correctly (and programmed thoughtfully).