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A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

washingtonpost.com

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Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#21

Post by qb45 »

Bartweiss wrote: post #6

This is definitely an impressive result, but I'm pretty sure it was made easier by the opposite pattern. I've had a couple of TAs who I strongly suspected of being chatbots, even when I was talking to them in person. I'm still not 100% convinced they were human.

Yeah, there exist humans who fail the Turing test.

Another thing is foreign students and teachers who, even if otherwise competent, quickly get one used to language comparable with machine output. I think I may have been guilty of that at one time :)

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#22

Post by ikeboy »

burkaman wrote: post #20
ikeboy wrote: post #9

>Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course's online forum. Is this normal?

Not 10,000 questions, 10,000 messages: http://www.news.gatech.edu/2016/05/09/artificial-intelligenc... That article says ~300 students, 30 posts each seems pretty normal.

So the original article:

1. Didn't mention it was an online course

2. Didn't mention there were 300 students

3. Claimed it was questions instead of posts

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#23

Post by eternalban »

"Education is such a huge priority for the entire human race."

Half a century into this current iteration of the game called 'Life as a Human on planet Earth' I have come to the conclusion that our primary focus must be Education and Mental Health. Take care of these and we may yet see our full positive potential.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#24

Post by [deleted] »

ars wrote: post #19

This is the key: > The system is only allowed to answer questions if it calculates that it is 97 percent or more confident in its answer. Knowing when you don't know the answer is something that has been lacking from AI I've seen. Of course the problem is that not all AI has the option of deferring to a human. Anyone know what percent of questions the AI answered, vs redirected?

[deleted]

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#25

Post by collyw »

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#27

Post by dimino »

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

I could reasonably ride a horse to work every day, it's only 2 miles.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#28

Post by betenoire »

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

I see it as a "high tech" interface to the same solution.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#29

Post by adekok »

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

Having written documentation for end users, that will work for only a portion of them. Probably most, which is good.

But there are a significant percentage of users who can't (or won't) read documentation. Even they do manage to read it, they don't understand it.

For some reason, human interaction works better for those people. They ask a question, and someone copies the answer from the documentation, and pastes it into the chat conversation. The user then goes "Oh, wow! That's helpful!"

But ask them to read a web page, and they get lost.

I would love to know the psychology behind this phenomenon.

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