To AI or Not to AI

Globally, there are alarm bells going off. Anthropic sounding the siren, other tech gurus clamoring for regulations, whilst investment in AI continues to sky rocket, it all sounds well, confusing! Then MIT shared the results of study, warning us that AI usage by students is leading to cognitive surrender.

In India, the news is buzzing with the suicide of a student at IIT-Bombay, who was caught using Chat-GPT in a mid-semester exam.

Schools are unsure about how to deal with students who use AI to complete homework assignments, or projects, while some teachers use AI assistance to set question papers.

Our Home AI Experiences

At my home too, there have been a lot of developments. My daughter used to despise AI, because it allowed her friends to do at the click of a button what she has spent years mastering; research, analysis and the art of well structured, clear and concise writing. But recently, she has had a change of heart and an epiphany.

A month ago, my husband dabbled in an AI story building game and found it surprisingly enjoyable. Yes, there were occasional hallucinations and absurdities, but for the most part the platform was able to develop a nuanced and engaging story incorporating input from the player at regular intervals.

As a software developer, he got interested and started building such a game for himself with some tweaks to tailor it better to his needs and interests. I was surprised by the speed and ease with which he was able to tackle this mammoth task, but he explained that AI could be effectively used to do a bulk of the work.

The Birth of an Idea

It got me wondering … My daughter, while fairly competent at programming tasks assigned by her school, has never shown much extracurricular interest in the subject. Her interests lie in international relations, history and law. As a hobby, she participates in various model UN (MUN) conferences. In particular, she enjoys researching various global issues and exploring them from the perspective of different countries to get a balanced and nuanced picture. Additionally, she enjoys articulating her thoughts and ideas in the formal structured format expected by the MUN rules of procedure.

It occurred to me, that if my husband could create this game for a variety of scenarios with endless possibilities, perhaps, he could help our daughter to use AI to develop a simulated MUN application, where a player could participate as a country of their choice in an AI moderated MUN session with well defined rules of procedure. The AI, I hoped would provide the other players and keep score based on the rules of procedure.

Full Steam Ahead

My husband and daughter got to work on the project, and it wasn’t long before they had the skeleton of a working app. That’s when my daughter discovered how powerful AI could be in assisting a novice at programming.

Since MUNs are her passion, she began to tweak the skeleton to improve its performance and add more features. Around the core of the app, she built an entire MUN ecosystem, with resource materials, tips and sample speeches, thus creating a website equipped with information and practice MUN sessions suitable for MUNers at all levels from beginners to experts.

Although my daughter used a lot of help from AI to generate code, as she reviewed it for optimization, she learned some javascript and html5. She also found that blindly using AI generated code resulted in unnecessarily high AI token usage. So she experimented with efficient ways to structure the code and reduce AI token usage.

All About SIMUN

The app named SIMUN short for simulated MUN, requires the user to provide either a free or paid API key from a standard AI provider like Gemini, Anthropic (Claude), or Open AI (ChatGPT). It allows the user to choose the country they wish to represent, the committee they want to participate in, the agenda they would like to discuss and allows the session to proceed at either beginner, intermediate, or expert level.

MUNers from sixth grade school students to undergraduate college students will find this application useful to learn the ropes and hone their skills. While the beginner level sessions provide plenty of suggestions and explanations of MUN terminology to guide newbies, the expert level supplies challenging AI opponents. The app keeps score, and to make the experience interesting and realistic every level has AI players of varying personality and skill, though the average skill of the players is greater in the higher levels.

Hiccups and Coffee Cups

My daughter originally created the application based on Gemini flash which provides a free API key in its lowest tier, so anyone could use it at no cost. However, over time she found that this model has very limited usability, because at other than for very short windows of unpredictable times, the model is perpetually overloaded making it practically very difficult to use.

Later, she added support for various AI models like Claude Sonnet that require paid keys, but fret not. An entire MUN simulation, typically lasting 8 hours will still cost you less than a cup of Starbucks coffee. The website has videos explaining how to obtain various API keys, and lists the pros and cons of using each type of key for the application, so you can make an informed choice based on your needs and priorities.

There is a demo video to can help you decide if splurging for the paid key is worth your while.

The Epiphany

This exercise taught us all something important.

One need not use AI as a crutch or a cheat. It can serve as a constructive conduit to new vistas of possibilities and playgrounds to build on.

My daughter’s ability to issue clear concise commands in plain English and structure her thinking helped her use AI to effectively implement programming, something she had never before imagined was within her reach.

Additionally, she has used it to create an application that helps her hone her skills at something she is passionate about. Her passion and years of experience with MUNs makes her the perfect candidate to develop such an application, and AI provides a realistic path to achieving her mission.

The lesson we learned was that, while AI will take away gainful employment at some level, passion assisted by basic logic and communication skills, will forge new avenues to dreams that could not have earlier been realized.

So productivity will increase, but not at the cost of opportunities. Just like the industrial revolution, hopefully, once we learn to adapt to it, AI’s implemented through LLMs will lead to a paradigm shift unlocking new possibilities.

A Handle on the Future

Like any new technological development, AI in the form of API keys that can be used to develop and build applications, rather than simply act as a personal assistant or homework helper, is expensive. On the other hand, chatbots and other mediums for passive consumption of AI such as homework help, summarizing of large complex texts to get the CliffNotes version etc, remains free.

Right now, schools have a counter productive approach to AI. Their instinct is to ban it, so as to prevent problems such as cognitive surrender. But as AI for assistance with school work is free and not reliably detectable, this ban cannot be effectively implemented.

So fear has to removed from the equation, and the situation needs to be tackled in a realistic and practical way. As my daughter put it, decades ago the calculator probably posed a similar threat. Yet even today, arithmetic is taught in schools without calculators until a certain age, after which efficient calculator use is taught.

Similarly, instead of imposing a blanket ban on AI, it may be more productive to provide students with limited AI credits access to build complex AI projects, so a lot of the planning and thinking still has to be done by the students. Such exercises can prepare students to use AI responsibly, efficiently and constructively, because as it seems today, AI is here to stay.

Schools and other educational institutions need to help students transform their perspective of AI as a crutch, which can cause skill atrophy, to AI as tool to facilitate leaping into a future one can only dream about right now.