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A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

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

#61
post #50
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

You know this is very interesting. I've often wondered if other humans I'm interacting with were in fact sapient.

perhaps they were poorly programmed philosophical zombies

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

#62
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.

Except you have to publicly post your question before receiving search results. A search function is a lot faster and you can do a few attempts.

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

#63
post #32
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And where would you get said horse? Where would you keep it? What would you feed it? Who would take care of it? Students should be capable of reading text . If they can't, they belong in kindergarten, not university.

You misspelled "customers".

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

#65
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd be surprised at how often students don't read webpages and fire off an email to the class TA or instructor. Replying with a link to the relevant part of the webpage is something I'd love to automate. (I teach a largish introductory university class)

You can automate replying with a link to the course webpage ToC. Also, make it absolutely clear that the reply is automatic. Hopefully they'll get the hint. Or heck, just make it a policy that if they haven't received an answer in a week, this means they need to look at the website. I don't know why some people strive to be so accommodating to laziness nowadays.

Laziness is a virtue. What you're suggesting is not all that different than creating a webpage that says "read the book" instead of adding value. If a bot can be created to make discovering answers easier why shouldn't it be done?

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

#66
post #59

I can't help feeling a big FAQ page with a search function would be a lot more useful. Especially if the entries contain aliases for common search terms, like "length" on the entry of "word count", it should cover everything. Now this is a forum where others can chip in as well, but the FAQ page could prevent you from having to post in the first place. And if you don't have to post publicly to get an answer from the…

Speaking from experience from being in this class, the unfortunate truth is many people don't bother to read the documents for assignments (thoroughly, at any rate). This one wasn't as bad as another one I took, but many people will ask questions which are easily answered by looking at the materials they're given. That's essentially the area in which this AI excels.

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

#67
post #10

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.

More human than human is our motto ... Next step will be to replace the prof, and then have the students replaced by surprisingly attentive interrogative expert systems, and the cycle will be complete.

Reminds me of a scene in the movie "Real Genius". The class was empty of people, was just tape recorders listening to another tape recorder set up by the professor.

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

#68
post #42
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?

> Anyone know what percent of questions the AI answered, vs redirected? That's actually a very good question. The article doesn't give many details other than: "There are many questions Jill can’t handle." For comparison, here's are the highlights of a study from 2014 on the mobile assistants (Siri, Cortana, Google): http://searchengineland.com/google-now-beats-siri-cortana-di... Google was able to offer "enhanced" a…

I really appreciate the enhanced answers.. "OK Google" has become my go to tool for a lot of things... "OK Google... what is 5 ounces in grams", or the inverse. It's almost invaluable, and could definitely make certain classes of applications (such as a calorie tracking app) far easier to use.

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

#69
post #29
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 i…

I would love to see email support go beyond that, and actually read the question... I hate when I get a canned response that is completely wrong, or doesn't apply.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's outside of the set of computable sets? Human intution can jump. Mechanical deduction must expend energy. Let me give you an example: Dmitri Mendeleev goes to bed, has a dream, and then delivers the periodic table . Can your machine do that?

The periodic table is the elements ordered such that common features occur together. You'd think some sort of clustering algorithm would detect this. A line of elements that almost never react with anything. A bunch of things that gain one electron, some that lose one. And so on.

Note: "must expend energy"

How many Joules did Mendeleev expend in his dream? How many Joules will your clustering algorithm require? In fact, how many Joules before a meta-algorithm supervisor decides on exclusively using clustering to solve the problem?

> A line of elements ...

Indeed. He arrived at the result with incomplete information.

    Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
    ..
    Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp
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