By the time her comprehensive exams rolled around in August 2024, Adriana Ivich had done nearly everything she could to prepare herself. To officially become a PhD student in biomedical informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Ivich needed to present her proposed research project and then meet with her committee for a closed-door grilling.
“It’s definitely one of the hardest times to be a PhD student,” Ivich says. “I spent months — years really — preparing, but you still don’t know what they’re going to ask you.”
‘Arms race with automation’: professors fret about AI-generated coursework
She could make an informed guess, however. Months before, she’d poured the biographies and publications of her five committee members into ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot developed by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, and used it to create digital simulacrums of each person. She then fed the mimics her research proposal and asked the program to respond as her committee might, asking detailed questions and identifying gaps in her knowledge. The actual meeting “went pretty much like ChatGPT said it would,” says Ivich, who passed with flying colours.
Her experience highlights just one of the many imaginative ways in which students are using generative AI. Unlike the ‘early days’ of two years ago, when using AI meant summarizing a paper or outlining an essay, students are now leaning into the tools’ ability to emulate human connection, turning chatbots into podcast hosts, language tutors, professors and even personal trainers.
“I want professors to work with students assuming they’ll be using these models,” says Lily Lee, who is studying manufacturing and design engineering and music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and is co-creator of the newsletter AI × Education. Although some educators worry about the erosion of critical-thinking skills, she says, “another way to look at it is that AI can help students learn more creatively, which helps them build their critical thinking as well.”
A back-and-forth conversation
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When ChatGPT first appeared in November 2022, many educators and academic institutions responded with blanket bans, unsure whether these tools were more likely to spark innovation or cheating. The jury is still out on that, but administrators have started to relax some policies and give teachers greater freedom to direct when they can be used. How these tools are used, however, is often driven by students.
“I’m pleasantly surprised at some of their creative uses,” says Victor Lee, a learning-sciences researcher at Stanford University in California who focuses on the intersections between AI and education.
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Like Ivich, many students seem drawn to applications that showcase the ‘human’ side of programs such as ChatGPT and NotebookLM, an AI-powered interface from Google in Mountain View, California, for interpreting documents. Although early iterations of these tools required users to key in queries, newer versions allow people to speak into a microphone, enabling more-natural, organic conversations.
Sami Melhem, who is studying computer science at Texas A&M University in College Station, created his own chatbot, Class Primer, to tutor him. Built atop ChatGPT-4, the program begins by asking for details about a class, including a course description, learning outcomes, required textbooks and a syllabus. Then, it breaks down the course into ‘priming sessions’ spread out over the semester.
Melhem now spends his Sunday afternoons familiarizing himself with a few weeks’ worth of material before the concepts are introduced in class. The bot lets Melhem engage with his lectures in different ways, such as by creating playful analogies or visual maps that link concepts and show how they connect over the semester. As a visual learner, Melhem says that the diagrams especially “help with understanding the subject as a whole”.
Other students, such as Jan Bartkowiak, who is studying economics at Minerva University in San Francisco, California, have made chatbots that emulate famous historical figures to interrogate their thinking. In 2024, Bartkowiak wrote an essay on the Vietnam War and used this exercise to probe how historians or contemporary political figures, such as Henry Kissinger, who served as the United States national security adviser and secretary of state during the conflict, might have framed certain events.
“You might want to quickly identify which book or philosopher supports your point, so instead of starting your research by digging deeply into those books, you can start with ChatGPT,” he says. “You can have back-and-forth conversations and ask clarifying questions, and that’s been very useful.”
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This ability to speak to chatbots has proven particularly helpful for students taking courses outside their main specialism — for instance, to attain skills that they need or want.
Elda Bengu is a psychology student at Arizona State University in Tempe, an institution that has embraced AI tools through an AI Innovation Challenge in partnership with OpenAI. As part of that effort, Bengu’s lecturer Christiane Reves created a chatbot called Language Buddy that Bengu has used to practise speaking German. Research shows that engaging in conversation is among the quickest ways to improve language skills, but students aren’t always able to say things in the clearest way or ramp up the complexity of their speaking. Language Buddy can.
Initially sceptical, Bengu says that after testing how the app handled her first language, Turkish, she was pleasantly surprised with its performance. “I was able to have a conversation and even ask it to speak in a certain dialect or accent, which would be especially useful if you’re learning to live somewhere new.”
Mastering the calendar
Another space in which students have successfully channelled the usefulness of generative AI is in streamlining their workflows. By using AI as a type of personal assistant, tools can quickly pull together information, prepare schedules and free up precious time.