Bill Gates once spoke at a conference about the potential of artificial intelligence. He believes that AI can help people learn.
What is Bill Gates talking about? At the ASUGSV, a tech conference in San Diego (USA), Bill Gates spoke in April 2023 about the potential of artificial intelligence to help students or learners in their studies – starting with reading and writing (via YouTube).
For many students, a kind of tutor is too expensive, said Gates. A good teacher goes through their students’ texts, highlights unclear points, and notes what information is missing in a text. According to Gates, AI could play an important role as a kind of “teacher,” providing feedback to students and helping them improve their writing skills, for example.
AI is also believed to assist us in getting better at math, Gates believes:
If you take the next 18 months, AI will act as an assistant to the teacher and provide feedback on writing. And then it will amplify what we can do in math.
Bill Gates at ASUGSV 2023 via YouTube
AI helps improve your texts
How can AI help? Almost 25 months have passed since the conference in San Diego, and there are already AI tools like “DeepL Write” and “LanguageTool” that provide you with detailed feedback on texts.
In addition to traditional spell checking and grammar checks, such tools show things like word repetitions or more professional formulations. Moreover, you can present a text you have written to artificial intelligence and ask for suggestions for improvement.
Chatbots like ChatGPT can then inform you that you could, for example, shorten or better structure paragraphs; use active instead of passive phrasing to make a text more vivid or should substantiate a statement better.
In the field of mathematics, AI can provide you with explanations or example problems. Bill Gates himself has already visited a school that uses AI in the classrooms. For example, a math teacher used artificial intelligence to create text problems for her students (via gatesnotes).
What is the difference with computers? Software that was previously used without AI primarily checks basic spelling – as is known from Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. Complex analyses of writing style are rather atypical as they are demanding cognitive tasks, says Gates. Computers can, unlike artificial intelligence, only execute predefined commands.
New tasks must be manually programmed into a computer, and so they can only provide limited feedback to students regarding their performance and assist in learning. However, according to Gates, AI is truly good at this.
Artificial intelligence can therefore now help you improve your skills – just as Bill Gates predicted in 2023. However, you can use chatbots not only to obtain feedback on your works.
ChatGPT can also assist in researching or translating various languages, although you should of course check in the second step whether the chatbot’s response is correct. You can read more tips on how to use AI for school here: ChatGPT: The 9 best tips for school and studies
