Students empowered with artificial intelligence
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Artificial intelligence empowers increasingly complex interactions between humans and machines. This technology, currently popularized by ChatGPT, provides a potentially enormous opportunity for business professionals, for business students, and for business educators. However, these same technologies pose similarly enormous challenges for teachers attempting to illustrate, explain, and apply these ideas to students. How can teachers intentionally and openly incorporate AI into our classrooms while reducing the risk of students substituting AI output for their own (also known as “cheating”)?
The term “metaverse” was first popularized in 2003 by Neal Stephenson in a science fiction novel entitled “Snow Crash.” It is fiction no longer. The idea gained momentum for online multi-player games like World of Warcraft. It has now evolved to allow all kinds of human interactions, including commerce, in two and three dimensions. Perhaps the “person” you are talking to is not actually a person but instead a machine. When combined with artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and decentralized autonomous (i.e. human-less) organizations – collectively known as Web3 – we are at the next frontier for our students to find business opportunities.
This is also a new frontier for education, improving upon the online and hybrid experiences that were employed during the pandemic to reach students in remote areas with immersive, practical experiences. This could be the dawn of the “death of distance,” where learning can occur anyway with internet access.
As a professor at Harvard, Stanford and Hult, I ask graduate students studying innovation to employ AI for their major assignments. Here’s the method to my madness. First, I ask teams of students to envision new businesses that either employ multi-sided platform marketplaces or generate revenues in the purely virtual world of Decentraland. They record these presentations to video. Second, I randomly assign students to critique these team presentations. In the template I provide, I pose several different questions: for example, how did the team design its network effects and how did they mitigate some of the headwinds that undermine the network effect? The last question in the series requires that students ask ChatGPT to write its own critique of the team’s idea. This requires that students iteratively improve the query to have AI provide an optimally useful answer. This is a skill – asking the right question – that the next generation of business leaders need to learn.
I also require that the students independently verify the accuracy of ChatGPT’s response. Borrowing from an expectation from Ethan Mollick, an Associate Professor at Wharton, I declare that students are responsible for the final conclusions that they extract from AI. They must find sources to bolster or reject AI’s response. Just as with any tool or external resource, students must include an accurate citation of their use of ChatGPT. Because I do not know the ideal formal format for such a citation, I suggest that they ask ChatGPT for how to cite ChatGPT.
There are several objectives that underlie this portion of the assignment. First, students must learn to leverage AI to improve the breadth, depth and articulation of their knowledge. AI is out of the box. We cannot put it back. Instead, just as with fire, iron, light and other mind-bending innovations, professionals must learn to best deploy technology to solve customer and societal problems. Universally accessible AI will also change the skills that business graduates will be expected to deploy soon after graduation. Instead of gathering and manipulating data to …….