Yesterday I saw a really fresh and useful idea on how AI tools can actually help students learn, rather than just regurgitate answers at them.

Summary and sources

I work in a university library. We’re starting to get vendors pushing generative AI tools at us.

Most of them are basically Microsoft Copilot, but using academic sources. You ask the tool a question. It turns your question into a search, generates a summary based on the top search results, then links to those search results so you can verfiy and dig deeper.

(I call this the “summary and sources” approach to AI.)

Examples include the legal database Lexus+ AI, the science database Scopus AI, and the general library search tool Primo Research Assistant.

But yesterday I had a meeting with some Clarivate representatives, and they told me about a new product they’re developing: an AI-driven tutoring tool called Alethea.

AI that asks questions

The idea is that while a student is reading an article, Alethea prompts them with questions to make them think deeper and read more closely about the article.

I love this idea. I love the idea of AI asking questions instead of providing quick (and sometimes wildly inaccurate) answers.

Of course, we only saw a slide show presentation. I do not know yet how well the tool lives up to the potential.

But an AI that asks questions rather than generating answers seems a direction in which AI actually enhances human capacity rather than just replacing us with a cheaper, shitter version.

The library at scale

I was thinking about what the perfect endgame would be for these sort of tools in the academic libary, and the vision I came up with was just the old fashioned reference interview, but at scale.

My university has about 90,000 students worldwide. There’s no way a library can employ enough librarians to help each student one-on-one, just as there’s no way ninety thousand students could all use the same card catalogue.

AI offers the potential for the library to offer its services at the scale required. We just have to make sure the tools actually provide a good service.

What I’d like to see

I’d like to see AI that…

• Asks the user questions to clarify what they’re after, like reference librarian would
• Asks the user Socractic questions to deepen their thinking about a topic
• Can help the user evaluate articles by, for example, identifying key articles in a field, or pointing out that the results of a particularstudy have been disproven
• Recognising that a question or topic is too complex for it to handle, and referring the user on to an actual human librarian

Postscript

WordPress now offers an AI Assistant to “optimize key details of your post”.

For a laugh, I clicked the Improve Title button for this post. This was its suggestions:

Take that, machines. You still can’t improve on me.