This Study Put Legal Experts Against AI. The Results Are Hard To Ignore

With

the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, we are becoming dependent on chatbots. This is a hard-hitting reality we cannot ignore. Even students are using AI for their assignments and exam preparations. However, a new study has highlighted that law professors preferred answers written by AI over those written by fellow educators when evaluating reasons to student questions, as per Forbes.

Professors Preferred AI Answers

The publication noted that this study involved professors from 16 law schools who reviewed around 3,000 anonymous answer comparisons. They were reportedly asked to pick which response better addressed questions related to contract law. This research was led by Daniel Nyarko, director of Stanford's Legal Innovation through Frontier Technology Lab, and Alejandro Salinas of LiftLab. Notably, the participants were not told whether the answers had been written using the AI or a human. Notably, the findings shocked everyone. Professors reportedly picked AI-generated responses about 75 per cent of the time. In several cases, the machine-written answers were judged to be clearer, better and more helpful than the ones written by humans. Researchers also reportedly checked whether the answers may potentially confuse students. The study found that AI-generated responses were flagged as misleading and educationally harmful only 3.5 per cent of the time. This suggests that the human responses were more than three times as likely to be considered potentially harmful to a student’s learning experience.

Despite the surprising results, the researchers are not asking for AI to replace professors. Nyarko mentioned that the findings should be viewed as an argument for the wholesale adoption of AI tutors. Rather than rejecting AI, he believes that there is some substance in learning from AI. These findings come at a time when schools across the world are debating how AI should be used in education. Some believe in AI-powered learning tools; however, others strongly believe that AI spreads misinformation and affects the critical thinking of students. Striking a right balance between human mentorships and AI’s appropriate use is what could be the solution to the issue.