Learning to use AI

Kids use AI for their schoolwork. Plenty of them use it, not as an assistant, but as the entity that does all the work. That is a problem obviously.

 

This blog is not on a solution for that problem (None exists. Not yet anyway). Instead, this blog is based on a post by college student Maximilian Milovidov on a course called Writing AI. What’s unique about it?

“(It) might be the only one on campus where artificial intelligence was not prohibited but, rather, required.”

The spirit of this course is an interesting experiment:

“What if we taught students to use AI critically, rather than insisting they ignore it or assume they're using it to cheat?”

AI, after all, he says, is here to stay. You can’t wish it away any more than our ancestors could wish away the printing press.

 

Here’s how the course works. Students have to bring their own ideas and outlines to the class.

“We fed drafts into a chatbot while documenting its suggestions and then explaining why we accepted or rejected them.”

The idea is to learn to use AI as a “friend”, as one of his professors put it.

“We began with our own sparks of inspiration, argument and thought, but learned to prompt chatbots to expose gaps in reasoning or find unseen connections.”

The key points here are (1) come up with the proposal oneself, (2) use the AI to identify flaws and misses, and (3) evaluate whether the AI’s feedback is right and relevant.

 

This course teaches the student how to use (language) AI. If done in that spirit and manner:

“Students using moderate AI assistance during lectures outperformed both the students using fully automated help and those using minimal support.”

 

An interesting course, no doubt. I do see three limitations. (1) Identifying when an AI is wrong is a chicken and egg problem. To spot an error, you need to be knowledgeable on the topic. But you are using the AI while you are still learning! (2) The ability to question, to doubt, to cross-check is an adult skill. Sure, college kids are almost adults, so they could do it with practice and training. So this technique probably can’t be used for school kids. (3) The course in question is all language-based content with subjectivity, but what about the objective/absolute worlds of math and science?

 

Then again, this is a start. The first step in a journey, where we will evolve new techniques and change course to live and work in the world alongside AI.

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