Georgia Tech's AI Teaching Assistant Fools (Some) Humans (EdSurge News)

Imagine if your teaching assistant was actually a robot--and looked like Alicia Vikander. A picture of the "Ex Machina" lead actress graces a Wall Street Journal article that explores students' surprise when they discovered one of their teaching assistants was, in fact, a bot. Her responses--which fooled even former IBM employees--were based on looking through nearly 40,000 questions and answers on a discussion forum. Ashok Goel, the professor who teaches the online Georgia Tech computer science course, believes that bots like Jill can answer 40 percent of all students' questions--many of the mundane variety--within a year. Best quote of the story goes to a student: "We're taking an artificial intelligence class. There should be some artificial intelligence here."