The Rise of AI Agents is already starting: AI students attending Ferris State University.
College students at Ferris State University could be attending college courses alongside ‘AI students’ starting this semester.
The University announced their two AI students — Ann and Fry — would be engaging in similar behaviors as their human classmates, such as listening to lectures, completing assignments and engaging in discussions.
These AI students are examples of a different artificial intelligence use case which did not grab as many headlines in 2023, but could enter the mainstream in 2024: AI Agents.
An AI agent can engage in the same behaviors as generative AI chatbots but with a big additional capability — it can be given parameters and additional background context that allows it to operation autonomously without constant human inputs. In other words, it can continue running without constant prompt requests like you would have to do with ChatGPT.
In previous episodes of The AI Education Conversation, I have highlighted previous academic studies around AI Agents, such as the notable project done by Stanford in replicating The Sims by creating an AI agent sandbox.
Why does this matter?
In the context of education, and really society at large, the increasing use of AI agents can pose a big problem because we really haven’t examined them closely and set guard rails around their most effective and appropriate use cases. Given their increasingly autonomous capabilities, this could magnify their ability to intentionally or unintentionally create harm, relative to Generative AI chatbots. This also comes at a moment where we have not even been able to build consensus and solid guidance around AI usage in education for AI chatbots, let alone these more sophisticated applications.
“We actually came up with the idea to help us better understand, how do we serve the future students at Ferris State University? What does the higher educational experience look like for students who may not just be 10 feet from the professor in a traditional classroom setting? That was really sort of the impetus, what started it all.”
This was the rationale Ferris State University provided for embarking on the journey of developing and implementing AI students at their university.
Speaking from an educator standpoint, this rationale infuriates me.
It infuriates me because it assumes two “AI students”, without the ability to understand real human experiences and context, will somehow be able to better define the experiences of students at FSU than REAL STUDENTS.
If you want to learn what the educational experience is like for students, ASK STUDENTS.
Rather than spending time developing AI agents, there is an opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence tools to develop the most robust, inquistive, and effective evaluation strategy and process any post secondary institution has ever seen.
How will ‘AI students’ be qualified to speak about a first generation students experience? A black student? A military veteran returning to school?
We should be using the potential of artificial intelligence to manifest the projects we as humans have always dreamed about but did not have the tools to bring them to fruition, not finding ways to outsource critical pieces of the human experience to AI.
Reflecting on student’s experience in higher education should only ever consider the perspectives of real human students actually going through the experience.
What do you think? Is there valuable in having ‘AI students’ attend our universities?
