Getting solutions while losing understanding – these are the biggest dangers of AI in education

AI in educations. For two semesters, Corvinus teachers experimented with ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence in their mathematics courses: all the time, their students were free to use AI for their assignments and even for their exams. The results surprised both instructors: students’ motivation and the overall knowledge level of the group decreased, and social inequalities between students became more pronounced.

AI in education

Artificial intelligence could soon completely transform the framework of education, and this process will have a significant negative impact on the common way knowledge is acquired. This is what Corvinus teachers Márton Benedek and R. Balázs Sziklai see as the main threat of AI in education, as they have allowed their students to use tools like ChatGPT for two semesters without restriction in their mathematics courses. The two instructors had expected an increase in student motivation from allowing the use of AI, but they achieved the opposite effect:

The good ones don’t win

“Bad learners were happy with the easier way to solve problems, while good learners realised that they could achieve the same results with less effort, so they stopped bothering with traditional learning methods,” says Márton Benedek, adding that the important phases of creating, making mistakes and understanding were lost in the learning process when solving problems with AI.

In the spring of 2023 – the first time Corvinus faculty members took an AI-enabling course – ChatGPT had only been around for a few months, and only a few students were using the tool. But in their course a year later, almost all students were using ChatGPT-like platforms. Within a year, the use of AI had become so widespread and the tools so sophisticated that the majority of students had blindly trusted them without even trying to understand the process that led to the solution of the tasks.