Ethan Mollick on AI

At the end of this past November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and, since then, there has been a lot of discussion of what AI will mean for education. Will AI render teachers irrelevant? Should AI be banned in the classroom? Will homework ever be the same again? Often, though, discussions of these questions can feel very abstract and distant, as if AI in education is some problem off in the future. Today’s guest, however, argues that it is anything but.Ethan Mollick argues that teachers should already be using AI to better their teaching, that we should already be using AI to accelerate student learning, and that we should already be thinking about the threat AI poses to traditional forms of schoolwork such as the essay and the problem set.Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He writes about AI on his Substack, One Useful Thing, and on Twitter. Over the past year, he has co-written three papers with Lilach Mollick on AI in education: Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts; Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts; and New Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments.Show NotesOne Useful ThingThe Homework ApocalypseDemocratizing the Future of EducationAssigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with PromptsUsing AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including PromptsNew Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments