OpenAI, which is behind ChatGPT, has announced a new Study Mode that aims to encourage students to understand their homework rather than taking a shortcut. The idea is to help students through a problem, step by step.
As artificial intelligence chatbots become increasingly common and inexpensive to access, students are often using them to complete homework, and this is discouraging critical thinking.
“When students engage with study mode, they’re met with guiding questions that calibrate responses to their objective and skill level to help them build deeper understanding. Study mode is designed to be engaging and interactive, and to help students learn something — not just finish something,” said the company in a statement.
In January 2023, just a few months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that 89 per cent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments.
An OpenAI demonstration highlighted what happens when a student asks Study Mode for an answer about an academic subject like game theory. The chatbot first asks what the student wants to know and then tries to come up with an exchange of queries. For example, the chatbot responds to a prompt asking for help with understanding Bayes’ theorem by asking the user what level of maths they are comfortable with and what their goal is.
The new mode has been designed in collaboration with teachers, scientists and education experts.
Study Mode is arriving days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggested that AI may change the future of education. In an interview on the This Past Weekend podcast with Theo Von, Altman said his child will “probably not” go to college: “You and I never grew up in a world that didn’t have computers. To us, computers always existed. It was kind of new but they were always around…. My kid will never be smarter than AI.”