Earlier this year, two professors at Vilnius University in Lithuania brought in some unusual teaching assistants: ai-powered versions of themselves.
The instructors, Paul Jurcys and Goda Strikaitė-Latušinskaja, created ai chatbots trained solely on academic publications, PowerPoint slides, and other teaching materials they had created over the years. And they called these chatbots “ai knowledge twins,” nicknaming one of them ai/paul” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>paul ai and the other ai/goda” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>Goddess ai.
They asked their students to ask the bots any questions they had during class or while doing their homework before approaching the human instructors. The idea wasn’t to discourage them from asking questions, but rather to encourage them to try out the chatbot doppelgangers.
“We introduce them as our assistants, as our research assistants who help people interact with our knowledge in a new and unique way,” says Jurcys.
artificial intelligence experts have been experimenting for years with the idea of creating chatbots that can perform this support role in classrooms. With the rise of ChatGPT and other generative ai tools, there is a new push to test robots as teaching assistants.
“From a professor’s perspective, especially someone who is overwhelmed with teaching and needs a teaching assistant, this is very appealing to them — they can focus on research and not teaching,” says Marc Watkins, a professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi and director of the university’s artificial intelligence Summer Institute for Writing Teachers.
But just because Watkins thought some teachers might like it doesn't mean he thinks it's a good idea.
“That’s exactly why it’s so dangerous, too, because it basically transfers these kinds of human relationships that we’re trying to develop with our students and between teachers and students into an algorithm,” he says.
In this week's EdSurge podcast, these professors tell us what the experiment was like: how it changed classroom discussion, but sometimes caused distractions. One student in the class, Maria Ignacia, also shares her thoughts on what it was like to have chatbot teaching assistants.
And we listen as Jurcys asks his chatbot questions and admits that the bot approaches things a little differently than he would.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcastsor in the player on this page.
