Chulalongkorn course using AI to turn students into ‘superhumans’

Asst Prof Voraprapa Nakavachara, an assistant rector who teaches the Digital and Innovative Economy course at the prestigious university, said she instructed her students to use ChatGPT to write fictional stories and use AI drawing programs, like Midjourney or Dall-E, to illustrate them.

The assignment is part of her goal to turn students into “superhumans”, she said in an interview on the Econ Connect YouTube channel on Tuesday. She pointed to the hero of “Iron Man” as an example of AI being used to transform people into superhumans. The movie’s hero uses an AI-generated program to surpass his physical limitations.

Students will learn how to work with AI and become aware of its limitations, Voraprapa said.

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that was launched in November last year. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

Currently, OpenAI uses a supervision code to restrict responses from ChatGPT, but advanced users have found a way to “jailbreak” or circumvent the restrictions by assigning “profiles” to ChatGPT before they ask it to respond. This reportedly allows them to instruct ChatGPT to write stories, compose music, predict stock market trends, and even write computer virus programs for them.

Voraprapa said her students would eventually discover ChatGPT’s limitations.

“For example, they will find that ChatGPT cannot write a good and long story. AI will still need human creativity to add to its creations,” she said.

Her students discussed their problems using ChatGPT in the class so they collaboratively learn how to use the AI more efficiently, she added.

The AI assignment is part of ongoing tweaks to the course she has been teaching for eight years. The course aims to familiarise her students with the digital economy and teach them how to make economic assessments based on its evolving technologies.

ChatGPT has become the talk of the town worldwide, with many people expressing fear that it will replace many jobs, such as computer programming and even TV script writing.

Vorapapa said AI has progressed beyond the point that people should fear it. Instead of worrying about whether AI will take jobs, people should learn how to use it to compete against people who already do, she said.

AI will lead to creation of new tools that can boost rather than damage the economy, Voraprapa said.