A good old chat about AI tools

Mid-September, OpenAI launched the latest version ChatGPT, GPT-4o1. A good opportunity to question two Hanze specialists about the state of affairs of artificial intelligence within the Hanze. Rix Groenboom, professor of New Business & ICT, and Erwin de Beer, Blended Learning expert at R&D, share their vision.

Text: Loes Vader
Photo: The photo of Rix Groenboom (left) and Erwin de Beer is edited with AI by Kim Frijters.

Is GPT-4o1 earth-shattering news? 
"This is certainly big AI news," says Rix Groenboom. "There have been rumours flying around about this for a while. ChatGPT was already very good in the humanities, in language, but arithmetic was not a strong point yet. GPT 4 solved 18 percent of the Mathematics Olympiad's sums, GPT-4o1 comes to 80 percent. It can not only calculate, but also reason and solve difficult beta problems." 

Erwin de Beer deems the new version of ChaptGPT remarkable but not earth-shattering. "There are constant updates, additions and new possibilities. Three, four or five players in the market alternate with something new. You can't see the wood for the green trees."  

Do AI tools make people or jobs obsolete? 
"No," says Erwin. "Generative AI itself doesn't take over jobs, but jobs do go to people who use it. People who don't use AI as a rule are followed by people who do. But if AI were to take over jobs, it would not necessarily be a negative thing. In the next ten to twenty years, the working population will be much smaller, if AI tools take over tasks, we will soon be able to do the same or more work with fewer people."  

Rix suspects that people who mainly produce paper should be very worried. "Including the boys and girls I like the most: the programmers. I'm really worried about that. There is a version of GPT-4o that is specifically focused on programming and code generation. When you see what it can do! It can spit out a working program based on a linguistic description. Give the command: create Tetris and you will get the code for the game Tetris. Of course, Tetris is a bit different from the software that calculates your tax return, but still." 

Is AI is a blessing for educators? 
Erwin: "Teachers who take their profession seriously, and that may be most of them, really need to rethink their method of education. AI is making it increasingly difficult to repeat lessons from the past. We have to think more and more about our education and especially about our way of testing. That's exactly what teachers who take their profession seriously are already doing." 

Rix: "This morning I cycled to work with the director of the School of Law, Suzanne van der Woude. I think Law Studies and also Communication, Media and IT are being hit hard. Groningen already has a startup that uses AI to write appeals. Of course, as a lawyer, you still have to read them. Then you can invoice for fifteen minutes, but you can't say: I've been sweating for three hours on your objection. You can also rethink and call this a positive development because AI lowers the threshold for access to justice." 

Can teachers individualise the lessons for students through AI? 
"The best thing would be if a student knew what they need," says Erwin, but that is often not the case. "Students could adapt the teaching materials in a way that suits them better, by formulating easier questions or more difficult ones. Take, for example, a student who is not good at reading. You can now use one of Google's tools, NotebookLM, to upload documents that NotebookLM then turns into a podcast. In it, two, currently American, voices explain the uploaded material." 

So is AI a blessing for students? 
"Poor students will certainly benefit from it," says Rix. "Smart students will get lazy. That's an observation, not a study. On the whole, the lesser gods will also be able to write good letters and generate efficient codes. The smart ones are less challenged." 

Erwin sees it in a more nuanced way. "Yes and no. There is, however, a difference between students in the first and second year and those who are close to graduation. I actually know very few students, so far, who try to get their diploma with as little effort as possible in that graduation phase. I meet a lot of students or recent graduates who take their profession very seriously. Those students and young professionals in particular can benefit immensely from AI tools. But yes, it has been made easy for lazy students to use a tool for something they don't feel like doing themselves." 

When ChatGPT was introduced, the main question was: how do we know whether a student has written their essay themselves or had an AI tool do it? Is that still the case? 
Erwin thinks smart teachers have known this for a long time. "It's fraud when a student who used AI says: ‘I made this up all by myself’. AI is here to stay, so we need to think about how we can use it in a good way. We can assume that students use AI, but as a teacher you want to know how they did it."  

In other words, a different role for teachers? 
Erwin: "The traditional triad is: from data to information, to knowledge, to wisdom. And especially with those last two steps, you won't make it with AI tools alone. For that, you need teachers. People with life and professional experience. They can help you separate the wheat from the chaff. AI can't do that yet, at least not reliably. Maybe sometime in the future." 

How can you keep up as a teacher? 
"By using those tools yourself," Erwin concludes. "I suspect that half of the teachers have never opened ChatGPT or any other AI tool." There should be a crash course available to help them get over that threshold," Rix adds. Erwin: "I can teach that course. I already do that on a regular basis. If all goes well, there will soon be a course in the PL-Academy. What I would also advise is: open Microsoft Copilot. Say: I am so-and-so, my work looks something like this, make a five-sentence story and end with: what can you do for me? Then the tool comes up with suggestions." 

What do we offer students? 
"We have started a minor: 'AI in beroep', which is now also offered in English: 'AI and your future profession'. Students learn to reflect on AI in their profession, whether you are a violinist, programmer or lawyer. What is AI, what are the legal aspects, the social aspects. In addition, they learn the basics of collecting, editing, visualising and analysing data. During a platform with 15 IT professors from various universities of applied sciences, we as Hanze received compliments that we are crossing the bear in a very hands-on, practice-oriented way. Challenge accepted," Rix laughs.