Artificial Intelligence Becoming More Common In Schools

Artificial Intelligence has been making its way into the classroom recently.

Tennessee Tech Professor Bill Eberly said the biggest trend in AI currently is chat GPT, a program that can accurately answer questions and generate writing based on machine learning. He said there are pros and cons to this rise in technology, that it can lead to cheating and plagiarism, but teachers should find ways to use it as a positive educational tool.

“We need to expect more from our students now,” Eberly said. “If this technology is giving them a start, and giving them part of the answer, why not let them use that but now expect more from that student.”

Eberly said Artificial Intelligence has been around for a long time, but it has been becoming more popular lately because advances in hardware over the last decade have accelerated existing concepts and made them more accurate and usable. He said AI programs like chat GPT accumulate knowledge and information and uses it to generate appropriate responses to problems and prompts.

“Basically what it is, you give it examples of solutions to a problem, it learns those so that when it sees that problem again or sees something similar to that, it solves that problem,” Eberly said.

Eberly said Tech is interested in teaching students about AI because it is going to be a big part of the workforce moving forward. He said everyone regardless of their field of study needs to have a basic understanding of the technology.

“Whatever field they’re in, they need to understand what this is, how this works, how AI works actually in general,” Eberly said. “Because AI is going to be a compliment to whatever fields they’re in. And then potentially in some jobs, it may be replacing some jobs that are out there.”

Eberly said some Professors at tech are already using existing AI in their research, and some could be planning to develop AI of their own in the future.