Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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.
Chapter 3: 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.
Chapter 4: 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.
And they also guessed that my answer was a chat bot's answer.
So was there any kind of bias towards the chat bot or just the very fact that they like ranked one that they thought was a chat bot lowly? That was what the bias was.
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Chapter 5: How did the biostatistics professor create his AI chatbot?
Yeah. Yeah. When there was, when you find out the foods made by the rats.
Exactly. Right. And then they go through this whole process of like, Oh, we have to shut the place down. Even though the food's amazing. Yeah. We have to shut it down because the rat made it. Right. And that's sort of a microcosm or our studies, a microcosm of that of that movie. Right. I love that is people are like getting to the point, especially educators, where they want to shut down.
We can't have a. But the studies that some of us are doing are showing that actually students really like it and people actually really enjoy the responses from it. Part of this is just getting to a trust with the AI. And I think that's going to take some time.
There's going to have to be lots of different things that happen before we get to a level of trust where we want to adopt it everywhere or in education.
You know, I've talked to a bunch of people about AI in education, and the debate is usually about cheating or automation or how it's going to transform education. But you've brought up this new thread of something to think about, which is just the human trust angle that I've not spoken much about before. Do you think this is a kind of lens we should be looking at it with?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you could really boil all of the things that you just talked about down to this is a trust issue. It's a trust issue on the faculty side. We don't trust that students are going to use AI correctly. We don't trust the AI to answer the questions correctly. And also, we, the students, don't trust the answers that the AI gives.
So there's just a big trust problem at the center of AI right now. And again, how you solve that, I think, is through exposure. And it's just going to take some time for folks to trust AI.
that it's good it's high quality right but our study showed that they already think it's high quality they actually prefer it over me right um and i know from developing it that it is quite good so i trust it my students like it um and but there's still this bias right and we can't just hide it from them and say we're going to give it to them. We have to do it in an ethical way, right?
Where everybody at the table understands this is how we're using this to help everybody learn more.
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Chapter 6: What were the students' preferences in the AI study?
Grateful to be here. Thanks again, David. Josh Lambert is a biostatistics professor at the University of Cincinnati.
New this winter on Global. Have you ever told a lie? Are you serious? Wasn't lying part of the job description of CIA? From executive producer Dick Wolf and the team behind FBI.
New partner. He can be a little by the book. You're not much use to me alive, but you're really no use to me dead. I never knew you cared. Two perspectives, one mission. You guys work in the open. We work in the shadows.
Starring Tom Ellis and Nick Gelfis.
Nice work, partner.
CIA. New series Mondays at 10 Eastern on Global. Stream on Stack TV.
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