Students Like AI, Unless They Know It's AI
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The show that makes you laugh, think, and occasionally uncomfortable. The Last Show with David Cooper. A new study found that students rated answers from an AI chatbot higher than those from a professor or a teaching assistant. That is, until they suspected those answers came from an AI. Is there some sort of bias that we have against AI answering our questions when we know they came from AI? Probably. But let's dig in here with Josh Lambert, a biostatistics professor at the University of Cincinnati. Josh, welcome to the show.
Thanks, David, for having me. I'm real excited to be here with you.
So the results, I want you to tell me about them. But when you looked at them, did you think, wait, like, did we just accidentally reveal something about human psychology here that when people find out that the information they just read is from a large language model, that they all of a sudden don't like it?
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Yeah. That's pretty much what we found was. Let me just back up a little bit. I'll tell you a little bit more about the study. Sure. So one of the things I do in my job is I meet with students in our what is called a doctor of nursing practice program.
What surprising preference do students have regarding AI chatbots?
And we meet regularly with the students one on one to answer their statistical questions, which is what I do. Right. And a couple of years ago, when ChatGPT got released, I said, maybe I could create a chat bot that could help answer their questions, but sort of through my own lens. And so that's what I did. I created that. And I have a student who works with me, too, to help answer those questions. And so what we did was we gave them the, they would ask their questions, and then we would give them three responses back, one from me, one from my student, and then one from the chat bot. We blinded them from it, so they didn't know which was which.
Why do students change their opinion about AI when they know it's AI?
And then they had to basically rate them and then also ask or answer the question, which one was the chatbot? So like you said, the results were they preferred it. But one of the most interesting things that we found in the data was not only did they prefer it, but the one that they rated the worst, they consistently guessed was the chatbot.
That's so interesting. I'm trying to relate this to a real world scenario.
What did the study reveal about biases against AI responses?
So maybe like a student emails you a pretty basic question that they're struggling with in the course. You run it through this chatbot that you've designed to help and it gives them an adequate response. That would be like a sort of real world, I don't know, analogy of what you're working on.
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, ideally, the way that this would work for them is we could actually just set this up on a website where they could go to at any point, ask their questions, get some feedback. And, you know, maybe that's sufficient for them. If not, we're always here to help them, obviously.
Sure, and I wonder if you could sneakily fake it, like you could delay the answer, you could sign the answer as coming from you or your team, your teacher's assistant. Yeah. So the students in general were pretty happy with this chatbot's answers, weren't they?
Not only happy, all of them said they preferred the chatbot's answers over my own and my students' answers. That must not have made you feel amazing about yourself, side note.
Yeah, it was pretty humbling, right? But, you know, I'm not so surprised. Okay, so let's get to the big twist here. What happened when the students found out that answer came from a chatbot and not you? To say nothing for the fact that you kind of designed the bot and designed the way it would answer. We got to give you credit there. But when they found that out, how did they then feel about the answers?
Well, the funny thing is that they never actually found out. So they got the answers. I had them fill out the response. But we never actually revealed to them what the truth was. So when they read this paper or watch our interview, they're going to find out for the first time that, oh, they guessed that the chat bot was the best answer.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–1:20
2
What surprising preference do students have regarding AI chatbots?
1:20–1:59
3
Why do students change their opinion about AI when they know it's AI?
1:59–2:25
4
What did the study reveal about biases against AI responses?
2:25–6:18
5
How did the biostatistics professor create his AI chatbot?
6:18–9:14
6
What were the students' preferences in the AI study?
9:14–10:01
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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