Using AI for Homework – Tips for Using Chatbots in School

Update (23.05.2023): You can now also use our AI for homework on our website! This service is free and does not require registration: Use homework AI on scoolio.de This option hopefully provides quick help with school questions. Since we have limited capacity for your questions on our website, it may happen that you need to wait a little before asking your questions. If you don't want to wait and want to ask unlimited questions, we recommend using our homework app.

Chatbots and AI-based virtual assistants like ChatGPT by OpenAI are increasingly used as tools for learning or doing homework. They offer a quick and convenient way to ask questions, gather information, and even write entire essays. However, you shouldn't blindly pass everything on …

Overall, chatbots offer many opportunities to improve in school and work more efficiently, if you know their strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths of Chatbots in Learning

1. Personalized support: Virtual assistants can support you individually by answering your questions or tailoring exercises specifically to your needs.
2. Efficient delivery of information: AI chats often use simple language and interactions to convey complex information easily.
3. Patience: When learning with bots, you have all the time in the world. They (still) cost nothing and have infinite patience to explain things you don't understand in many different ways.

Weaknesses of Chatbots in Learning

1. Availability: Virtual assistants are available around the clock, so theoretically you can ask questions and receive learning support at any time. Theoretically, because currently, their capacity is often overloaded, and you might have to wait for an hour before you can use them.
2. No human interaction and experience: AI chats lack human components that are often important for learning. They can only ask if you understood something, unlike a teacher who can read it from facial expressions and knows where students often struggle.
3. Lack of critical thinking skills: Text-based AI systems cannot develop or apply critical thinking skills to solve complex problems.
4. Expression: Texts from virtual assistants are always very formal and often filled with repetitions in longer explanations.
5. Privacy: No one knows what data is collected from users. Since the bots usually have your email address, they can, in the worst case, create a very detailed user profile.
6. Limited competence: The knowledge of text-based AI systems is limited to what is in their database. This is particularly obvious with current questions or incorrect information from online sources.

Currently, ChatGPT's knowledge ends one to two years ago.

Also interesting regarding competence is a recent Instagram post from Spiegel, whose comments don't give ChatGPT good ratings. Also interesting is the video review by Prof. Dr. Edmund Weitz, who claims that ChatGPT doesn't have any serious computational abilities and even invents answers to factual questions.

Completely outsourcing all your tasks to this new tool will not do you much good. In addition to the weaknesses mentioned above, you would also miss out on all the practice effects. Imagine, if you had outsourced all your math problems to the electronic helper for months and had to write an exam next week. Teachers don't give homework to torture students, but to help them. At least, most of them. ;)

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto?

Despite all the criticism, one thing should not be forgotten: Virtual assistants are still learning how the world works. In one or two years, their error rate will likely decrease significantly, and there are already some ways to use chatbots as supportive learning companions.

6 Tips for How Chatbots Can Help You with Homework

1. Have a chatbot generate exercises and tests after discussing a specific topic with it. For example: "Create an exercise for linear equations" or "Create a 5-minute English vocabulary test for 9th grade on the topic of travel."
2. Virtual assistants shouldn't do your homework, but you can have them check your work before your teachers do.
3. Critically question the results you get and verify them with current sources. Especially the references.
4. If you have trouble finding good formulations for texts, have the chatbot suggest different variations.
5. Speed up research work by copying long texts into the chatbot's input and asking it to summarize them in 5 sentences.
6. If it can't be helped and the AI needs to save the forgotten 10-page essay tomorrow morning, work through the task chapter by chapter together. It takes time, but this way, you avoid the text repeating itself constantly.

In summary, chatbots have a few strengths and (still) some weaknesses when it comes to being a learning resource. If you use them to minimize drudgery and avoid the areas where they have problems, you can get a lot of good out of them.

Authors: Team scoolio & ChatGPT ;p

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