BY Allison Schrager & Amy X. Wang, Quartz
Jill Watson is the best damn teaching assistant you could ever want. She fields hundreds of questions at a time from frantic 19-year-olds, always answering them in full and at record speed. She hardly makes mistakes. She is, above all, stunningly patient.
“I got comments like ‘Mind blown’ and ‘I want to nominate Jill for outstanding TA award’,” says Ashok Goel, a computer-science professor at Georgia Tech—and Jill Watson’s creator. Jill is an AI education tool. Her birth came about last year, when Goel was teaching an online class on artificial intelligence; his 300-odd students in the course were sending in thousands of questions at a time, and they piled up, disastrously.
Imagine how great universities could be without all those human teachers
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