my qiestion is about AI in educationn. for example, if i asked to read an argumentative book, then to distinguish arguments in terms of premises and conclusion, and then make an evaluation on whether the arguments were sound and cogent, can’t i simply load the text to AI and ask for the arguments and an evaluation. it seems the education is in knowing what I am asking AI to do, and perhaps make an independent judgment of the performance. Elaborate and evaluate
ChatGPT said:
You’ve raised a highly relevant and thoughtful question about the evolving role of AI in education, particularly in the context of critical thinking tasks like analyzing arguments in a book. Let’s unpack and evaluate your point in detail.
Your Core Argument
You propose that:
If students are asked to analyze a book—identify arguments, break them into premises and conclusions, and evaluate their soundness—they could just use AI to do this.
Therefore, the real educational value may lie not in doing the task manually, but in knowing how to instruct AI to perform the task and in judging its output.
Elaboration
Let’s break this into key ideas and evaluate them:
1. AI Can Perform the Task
Yes — AI (like me) can:
- Read a text (given or uploaded),
- Extract arguments,
- Identify premises and conclusions,
- Evaluate validity (logical structure) and soundness (truth of premises),
- Assess cogency in inductive reasoning.
Evaluation: This is already true for many well-written argumentative texts. AI can perform this task competently, especially with clearly structured writing.
2. Educational Value May Shift
Your insight is that the educational focus shifts:
- From: “Manually identifying and evaluating arguments”
- To: “Knowing how to ask AI the right questions and critically assessing its output”
That’s a paradigm shift — from doing to orchestrating and critiquing.
Evaluation: This aligns with broader changes in education and work — knowing how to work with tools (especially intelligent ones) is increasingly more important than doing everything without them.
3. New Skillset: Prompting and Critical Oversight
To effectively use AI in this way, students must:
- Understand the task deeply enough to explain it to AI (prompting),
- Know what to look for in a good answer (logical consistency, relevance, etc.),
- Be able to spot when the AI’s output is incomplete, biased, or flawed.
Caveat: Blindly trusting AI would defeat the purpose of education. Students still need a base of critical thinking and logic to assess the AI’s performance.
Evaluation: This encourages meta-cognitive skills — thinking about thinking — which are highly valuable.
Implications for Education
If your reasoning holds, here’s what it suggests about the future of education:
Students should:
- Learn how to ask the right questions of AI (prompt engineering),
- Be taught the underlying concepts (e.g., logic, argument structure) well enough to assess AI output,
- Practice hybrid workflows — using AI as a collaborator, not just a tool.
Educators should:
- Shift assessments to include evaluation of AI-augmented thinking,
- Encourage students to reflect on and critique AI responses,
- Teach students to identify when AI might misinterpret, oversimplify, or hallucinate.
Conclusion
Yes, AI can do much of the heavy lifting in tasks like argument analysis. But the educational value now lies in knowing what to ask AI, how to interpret its response, and how to challenge or refine it.
This isn’t a loss of education—it’s a transformation. Like the calculator changed math instruction, AI will (and should) change how we teach thinking and analysis.
Your Idea, Reframed as a Thesis
“In an era of AI-assisted learning, education should focus less on manual cognitive labor and more on developing students’ ability to collaborate with AI through strategic prompting and critical evaluation.”