Artificial intelligence can help teach your children and improve their grades in the near future. At least, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft Bill Gates says AI chatbots are on their way to helping kids learn to read and improve their writing skills within 18 months.
“Artificial intelligence will achieve this ability to be as good a teacher as any human can do,” Gates said during his keynote speech at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego.
In the last few months, AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard have quickly made the headlines and can now compete with human-level intelligence on certain standardized tests. This rise has triggered both excitement about the potential of the technology and discussions about the possible negative consequences.
We can say that Gates is on the side of those affected by technology. Stating that today’s chatbots have an incredible fluency in reading and writing, Gates said that these abilities will soon help students develop their own reading and writing skills in ways that technology has never before.
“At first, we’ll be amazed at how as a reading research assistant it helps to read and give you feedback on writing,” Gates said, according to CNBC’s report.
Historically, teaching typing skills has proven to be an incredibly difficult task for a computer. When teachers gave feedback on essays, he said they looked at features like narrative structure and clarity of prose, but these were “high cognitive work” that were “hard” for developers to copy in code.
However, it is stated that the ability of artificial intelligence chatbots to recognize and recreate human-like language is changing this dynamic. New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose wrote last month that he has already used ChatGPT programs to improve his writing using artificial intelligence’s ability to quickly search online style guides.
Chatbots are influencing academics
Some scholars say they’re impressed with chatbots’ ability to summarize and provide feedback on bits of text and even write full articles.
But the same academics warn that the technology is not yet fully mature and could unintentionally lead to significant errors or misinformation. Gates said AI technology needs to evolve to read and recreate human language to better motivate students.
“If you just look at the next 18 months, the AIs will come as a teacher’s aide and provide feedback on writing,” Gates said. “And then they’re going to improve what we can do in math.”
Since algebra and calculus are often used to advance artificial intelligence technology, the idea that chatbots will excel at reading and writing before math may come as a bit of a surprise.
However, experts note that chatbots trained on large datasets often struggle with mathematical calculations. If the datasets that chatbots are trained on already have a math equation solved, it can offer you the solution to that problem. However, it is much more difficult to reach this solution on its own.
after 2 years…
Gates says he’s confident the technology will likely evolve within two years, although it will take some time. It can then help provide tutoring to another enormously wide range of students.
While ChatGPT and Bing both currently have limited free versions, it can be speculated that this service will not be completely free as ChatGPT launched a $20-per-month subscription plan called ChatGPT Plus in February. Still, Gates says it would at least be more affordable and accessible than taking one-on-one lessons with a human instructor.