CodeAid: A classroom deployment of an LLM-based coding assistant

1. Provide students with the tools and knowledge to critically verify responses, either coming from an educator or a an AI agent. 2. Build more transparent AI agents that show how reliable they are on different types of queries. Our deployment showed that the Help Fix Code was less reliable, while other features were significantly better.

But totally agree that we should be discussing the ethical implications much more.

Human TA's have ego, AI doesn't. With proper tools, you should be able to steer an AI agent.

I think both humans and AI agents both have their drawbacks and benefits. That's why the last section of the paper discusses that we even need to teach students (or provide tools) to help them decide where to use AI vs non-AI tools.

Ehh. Those TAs, if they feel they might be wrong, can consult the lecturer/professor. And if they feel they might be wrong, they can just say so.

IMO there is little to no comparison between a bad TA and a confidently-wrong LLM (having been a TA who knew to consult the professor if I felt I was not on solid ground).

LLMs have no experience with teaching, they have no empathy for students grappling with the more challenging things, and they can gain no experience with teaching. Because it's not about spewing out text. It's about guiding and helping students with learning.

For example: can an LLM sympathise or empathise with a cybernetics student who is grappling with the whole conceptual idea of laplace transforms? No. It can only spew out text with just the same level of investment as if it was writing a silly song about cats in galoshes on the Moon.

I wish we were not in this "well humans also..." justification phase.

It is genuinely disrespectful to actual real people and it's founded on projection.

And in this case, it will also shut down the pipeline of academic progression if TAs are no longer hired.

Why are we doing this to academia when the better approach would be giving TAs better training in actual teaching? More-senior academics doing this kind of research work is absolutely riddled with moral hazard: it's not your jobs immediately on the line.

ETA: sooner or later, people in the generative AI market should really consider not just saying that we should talk about the ethical implications, but actually taking a stand on them. It's not enough to produce something that might cause a problem, rush it into production and just say "we might want to talk about the problems this might cause". Ethics are for everyone, not just ethicists.