A college in the USA recently disguised an artificial-intelligence (AI) robot as a teaching assistant (TA) and for the most part, no one knew the difference. To the 300 students studying an online course artificial intelligence course at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Jill Watson was just one of nine TA’s there to assist with course work and queries. But in reality Jill was a robot, powered by IBM’s Watson analytics system, which is where she got the name Jill Watson.
Jill was designed to handle some of the more mundane and routine tasks normally performed by TA’s such as responding to student queries via email. Jill would also remind students of due dates and even post comments on discussion forums. "She was the person - well, the teaching assistant - who would remind us of due dates and post questions in the middle of the week to spark conversations," says one student. "It seemed very much like a normal conversation with a human being."
The professor behind the unorthodox staff hiring, Ashok Goel, worked with a team of Georgia Tech researchers to design and develop Jill. The bot was given 40,000 discussion forum posts in order for it to learn how to respond based on previous TA discussions. Jill would only respond to queries if she could delivery an answer with 97 per cent accuracy. For an online course with so many students, this kind of assistance eased the burden of the other living, breathing TA’s.
Although most students in the class were surprised to learn the true identity of the TA who had helped them throughout the past months, some did have suspicions, especially given the nature of the artificial intelligence course and the name of the TA (being named after an analytics system). Next year Ashok Goel plans on telling the students that one of the TA’s is in fact a robot without actually revealing which one it is. He believes that in a years’ time, the robot will be able to answer 40 per cent of student queries.
