Bill Gates: "AI Useful for Checking School Homework... But Cannot Replace Teachers"

"Excellent Feedback Unlike Existing Programs"
"Homework Review Possible with Added Grading Feature"

Microsoft founder Bill Gates argued that artificial intelligence (AI) can be very useful as an educational tool. Unlike other software (SW), AI can provide direct feedback on assignments written by children, which is the reason for its usefulness.

On the 15th (local time), US CNBC and other media outlets reported this by quoting Gates' recent remarks on the podcast 'Unconfuse Me.' In the podcast, Gates stated, "AI chatbots can read and analyze student assignments and provide useful feedback."

He pointed out that writing education software and other programs have so far failed to properly perform the most important 'feedback' function in children's education.

Gates explained, "Students using current SW tools do not receive feedback on essays or assignments because the SW lacks language datasets and logical functions."

Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft [Photo by AP Yonhap News]

On the other hand, AI chatbots developed with large language models (LLMs) can directly review children's essays and provide feedback by identifying insufficient parts, grammatical errors, and awkward sentences.

LLMs, including ChatGPT, have learned from massive language datasets, so the quality of feedback is also excellent. All that remains is to add grading functionality.

However, Gates did not believe that AI grading tools could completely replace human teachers. He emphasized, "Chatbots will be limited to administrative roles such as checking homework," and "the key is to reduce teachers' workload." He also expected that increasing the productivity per public school teacher could help close the educational gap between low-income and high-income students.

Meanwhile, the Western education industry, including the US and the UK, is accelerating the development of educational tools using AI. Pearson, one of the world's largest education companies based in the UK, launched multiple AI-based educational platforms last month. The US-based Khan Academy is developing 'Khanmigo,' an AI tutor program applying ChatGPT.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.