(TNS) — If an artificial intelligence agent told you that you were talking about your coworkers too often in a group discussion, would you heed its advice?
Some Duke Business School students do.
It’s part of an experiment in which Duke University professors and students have AI record their work and learning, informing them about how to improve interpersonal relationships and engagement.
In one classroom at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, an artificial intelligence agent is constantly recording. The classroom holds classes on topics such as taxes and accounting. The agent knows who sat where and what was said during class, and uses that recording to assess the quality and quantity of individual student participation, determine which comments most drive discussion, and help professors evaluate students.
Students also record group project meetings outside of class, and an AI agent evaluates discussions for balance, productivity, and creativity. Professors can then review the AI’s analysis of group dynamics.
Four Duke University MBA students and one professor spoke to The News & Observer about how the use of AI has impacted their learning experience. In the so-called “AI classroom,” students said the tool felt more like accountability than oversight.
Still, Jenny Lawrence, a student from London, said there was a “teething pain getting used to the experience of being watched”. Second-year student Samantha Rowe said students may be less inclined to make small talk with each other or chat about topics outside of class.
If you want to complain about the assignment itself, pause the AI recording.
Phillip Cole, a third-year MBA student and Marine Corps veteran, described the type of feedback the AI provides after listening to a group discussion.
“You go from “interesting” to “good enough” to “done,” but you don’t actually arrive at the best solution. [the AI said]. It was actionable feedback that helped me change my behavior in the next meeting. ” said Mr. Cole. If they say they only spoke 5 percent of the time, it means they’ve been prepared because the emphasis was on not contributing in the same way. ”
Cole said AI’s analysis of moments of conflict within the team forced some members to evaluate how they were viewed, and the group faced the realization that not everyone was on the same page even after the meeting was over.
“It’s much easier to get feedback from an emotionless tool,” he said. “I’m not one to feel like you’re accusing me of anything.”
Bill Mayeux, a business professor at Duke University, echoed Cole’s sentiments. He says students can “shake things up with the AI” by providing feedback that they may not feel comfortable giving each other about how they control themselves or how much they talk to each other.
Mayew said that by looking at AI summaries of group discussions, students can call on specific students to share their opinions during class. It gives you an unprecedented window into your students’ thought processes, allowing you to see which teams disagree on an issue.
“It’s about professors expanding their influence,” Cole said. “If he has two students, he can spend that personal time with them. If he has 70 students, he can use this tool to have an even bigger impact.”
Duke Fuqua spokesperson Ashley Cimino said recordings of classes and group discussions are preserved but anonymized, and all data is kept securely behind Duke’s firewall. She said all personal information will be anonymized before being analyzed by AI.
Mayew built a custom AI tool that students can use in their courses. He sees it as a companion to a course or an evolving textbook. He said he trained the custom ChatGPT model on his own notes and case studies, and instructed it to never provide answers to students, but rather to help them arrive at the answers themselves.
“When I left Fuqua, I used to have slide decks and notes that I had taken,” Mayeux said. “Now we have the entire history of the course, all the lessons. It’s like a custom website with all the topics and all the questions the students have asked. It doesn’t have a name, it just says, ‘Hey, we had a question about this. Here’s something controversial and here’s the solution.’ They will walk away from Fuqua with documents that will be searchable five years from now, allowing them to almost relive their lessons. ”
In addition, AI could provide students with quantifiable data about their interpersonal skills that they could present to future employers, Mayew said.
But research conducted elsewhere at Duke appears to lend support to the experiences of these business students. A recent study by Emily Wenger, a computer science researcher at Duke University, concluded that groups of people are more creative than AI because large-scale language models tend to provide homogenized creative output that is similar across different models.
But for business students at Duke University, it truly feels like they’re participating in something new.
“A lot of times people talk about, ‘What’s going to happen with AI? What’s going to happen to society?'” Cole said.
The answer is, what does he think? Like this.
“We’re actually doing it, we’re actually experimenting with it,” Cole said. “We use the ChatGPT website to not only ask questions; [AI] In a novel way. I never thought that AI could enhance teams and strengthen relationships, but now that I’ve been able to experiment with it, I know. ”
“I’m excited about being able to learn how to grow as a leader and as a teammate,” Cole said. “And this was the coolest tool I’ve seen at Fuqua to do that.”
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