AI in education

Type				Team Size
Me, Myself and I	Group Collaboration	The Academic System	Software	1	2-10	11-30	30+

   

What, Why & When

Digital tools of artificial intelligence have become a a groundbreaking and dangerous array of softwares that modern education need to deal with. While fears are mounting that students will flock to openly available tools to solve their homeworks, current algorithms are undeniably so bad that one cannot know if we should laugh or cry, as Noam Chomsky put it. This makes it all the while more important to highlight the role of AI tools, how these could be used, and where we should actively criticise them or even altogether reject them. It is clear that approches such as ChatGPT have a humongous amount of knowledge, yet they cannot really make a lot of sense of it like at all. To this end, current AI is like a three year old with a massive brain, knowing vaguely everything humankind knew of a rudimentary but widespread level, but being incapable to make any sense of it, or show any experience whatsoever. „But it's as always and everywhere: The industry sees a huge energy reserve, while science views it as a time bomb.“ - (translated to English) Frank Schätzing: Der Schwarm.

Use cases of AI

Is AI truly intelligent? Can we use it reliably in teaching, research and writing essays? Haven’t we all felt guilty of ignoring this question for too long? OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of November 2022. The impact on students ever since has been tremendous: AI is serving students as a personal tutor and study buddy, a test generator, language learning assistant, summarization tool, programming tool and brainstorming tool. Which unique value does it leave us to create? Where does it leave us as a society? And how can we use it with good conscience? In the following, we will discuss the roles of AI in education taking highly normative and pragmatic perspectives. Being the center for methods at Leuphana University, our judgement on AI & technology goes beyond its end-goal. Personal Tutor and Study Buddy Premise: AI serves as a versatile, 24/7 personal tutor, offering expertise in various subjects, eliminating the need for expensive courses. It functions as an intelligent study partner, explaining complex concepts in a clear and understandable manner, aiding in problem-solving.

Objection: Learning is based on experience, which ChatGPT cannot have. It cannot feel what a learner currently needs, and is not able to push a learner into a uncomfortable learning space that is often at the core of the grace of teaching. ChatGPT as it stands has way less expertise as -say- Wikipedia, and its knowledge is shallow at best. Learning to evaluate information from the internet is an important skill. Answers from ChatGPT are always way too short to do any decency to any topic. AI is not intelligent, far away from it. The word complex is anyway difficult and ambiguous, and I evaluate thousands of answers, which were not clear but wrong and build on unprecise wording. Worst of all, we cannot replace human interaction with AI. If we do this, we can pretty much guarantee our sanity to end, nothing will be a better guarantee for this but to use AI as buddies. Compromise: Outputs are as shallow as the inputs. If you apply the socratic method and approach the solution to a formulated question by asking questions, you can get a detailed understanding and simultaneously check the argumentation and logic of the AI’s output. Do not ever take any aspect of the AI’s output for granted! good prompt vs bad prompt

test generator

premise: ChatGPT can generate unlimited practice questions for any subject, helping students prepare for exams.

Objection: The questions are bad, and if they are able to compete with and real world teaching, then this teaching is obviously very bad. Also, the process of isolating the underlying questions is what makes you actually grasp the topic and its connections. Consequently, eliminating this step of learning is fatal if you want to actually learn something.But even if you just want to pass a test, you can save yourself time. Also, ChatGPT can’t identify your knowledge gaps. You must do that.

The table below displays an ideal-typical process of the Walking exercise.

Header text	Header text	Header text	Header text
Example	Example	Example	Example
Example	Example	Example	Example
Example	Example	Example	Example
Example	Example	Example	Example

 

Links & Further reading

Papers

According to Chicago Style conventions

---

The author of this entry is Max Mustermann.