Andrey Karpathy is not the only one who believes that AI-based bots are the future and will help solve the problem of lack of good teachers. The same opinion is shared by Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI), Sal Khan (CEO of Khan Academy), Marc Andreessen (venture capitalist), Stuart Russell (computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley).
But history suggests that such bots are unlikely to be an effective substitute for human teachers, says Annette Wee, an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Students have long resisted the inclusion of machines in their learning process and are generally more willing to interact with and be inspired by real people.
Research shows that students learn writing best in classes of up to 15 students, but this requires more teachers. This is where AI can help.
But such technologies for teaching people are no longer new. Thus, in the 1950s, BF Skinner designed so-called teaching machines. If the student answered the question correctly, the machine would move on, otherwise it would stay at this stage until the student solved the problem.
But the problem was that the students were not learning much. They also found such “inhumane” methods boring.
More recently, “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, have emerged, and again, after a while, students lose interest in them and drop out.
AI is already being used to create course instructors, but how effective will it be?
Students will most likely not like the idea of bots being used instead of real teachers again. There are several reasons for this. For example, students are unlikely to be as excited and inspired by such teachers as they would be when interacting with a real person. Lack of privacy and data security can also be a deterrent. These platforms collect information about students and their performance that can be misused or sold.
And if a bot starts teaching millions of people at once, we could lose authenticity. If “academic success” depends on repeating what an AI instructor says, where will it come from?
Source: Ferra
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