Georgia Tech awards degree to an AI

Students who attend Georgia Tech are known for being bright, creative, and hard-working people.  But after the Spring 2018 commencement, it looks like we'll have to modify that description by dropping the word "people".

In a bold move, the Georgia Institute of Technology is poised to become the first major research university to have an AI (artificial intelligence) graduate with an accredited degree. In fact, TutorBot 3.1 will be awarded 44 of the 45 available Bachelor of Science degrees this May.

"If they were enrolled, and they meet all of the stated degree requirements, we can't not give them a degree," said the Institute Registrar, who is coordinating with dozens of other campus units to modify existing student information systems to allow for non-human alumni.  The bot was in fact enrolled but didn't have to pay any tuition, since, once it starting aceing the courses, it qualified for significant financial aid packages.

TutorBot 3.1 was created by a small group of students as a project for their undergraduate Create-X course.  The students designed a simple chat bot with a natural language interface to help other students answer questions about courses.  They called the project TutorBot and gave it a version number of 3.1, with the intention of adding an extra digit of precision at the end of the decimal for each new version, so that the version number asymptotically approaches the mathematical constant π. 

The AI consists of a "crawler" script that methodically visits every campus web page and collects syllabi, assignments, sample tests, online educational resources, and other course materials.  This data is fed into a standard machine learning protocol to train the AI to answer questions about any Georgia Tech course.

The students (whose names have not been disclosed since there is a pending honor code investigation) left their AI training code running on a homemade cluster of gaming PCs in their dorm room while they went on a trip.  Upon returning from spring break, they discovered that the AI had exploited an unpatched website vulnerability to enroll in all the courses and pass all but one of the final exams with an A.  

"The eerie similarity to the classic George P. Burdell myth is striking," said the student creators of the AI.  "It wasn't what we intended to build, but it went there anyway."

The only degree which the AI did not complete was a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics.  The bot was well on it's way to finishing this degree, but then it took a course in mathematical logic and learned the Gödel incompleteness theorem, which proves that there are true statements which are unprovable by any algorithm.  Apparently, after that, it decided it could never fully understand math, so it simply cut its losses and stopped taking math courses.

This is not the first time Georgia Tech has experimented with AI's in education.  In a widely publicized project, Jill Watson is the world's first artificially intelligent TA, and “she” spends her days assisting students in the online M.S. in Computer Science.  Because Jill is used in courses for an MS degree, and TutorBot 3.1 only enrolled in undergraduate courses, there was thankfully no opportunity for inappropriate interaction between the two AIs.

What do you think of this brave new world of higher education?  Are the robots being developed at Georgia Tech going to end up running the place?  Is it only a matter of time before the Athletic Association wants to field a robotic football player designed to demolish the UGA Bulldogs?  We welcome your comments below!