With school back in full swing, Adobe has announced a new subscription to Acrobat AI Assistant for just two dollars a month to help students with information overload. But won’t the new tool actually damage the educational experience?
“To help manage the crush of information and transform thousands of pages into insights they can use, Adobe is offering a deeply discounted, yet fully-featured Acrobat AI Assistant subscription for students at just $1.99/month,” the press release says.
According to Adobe, students of today face more information than ever, and the new tool might be able to help them “focus their study time and effort.”
Acrobat AI Assistant will thus helpfully summarize documents into “concise outlines” and, if asked, present the information in “easier to understand language.” It will also provide clickable attributions for easier verification and insights across documents.
Adobe promises that students will be able to use the tool to test their understanding of specific topics before an exam or presentation.
“For example, if a student is preparing for an upcoming midterm, they can input their class documents into Acrobat AI Assistant and ask it to generate quiz questions or flashcards with answers,” said the company.
Adobe adds that the assistant will also help brainstorm ideas. For example, after reading a research report about the Fall of the Roman Empire, a group of students could potentially be offered a list of themes like instability, economic decline, and overexpansion.
Acrobat AI Assistant is available across all desktop, laptop, and mobile devices. A “two-way voice interaction feature,” enabling users to converse with the bot about the material, is also promised.
Now, all this still sounds a bit like cheating, even if Adobe stresses that customer data, including student documents, are not used to train their models. That’s because reading, interpreting, and even misunderstanding the material are actually essential parts of the learning experience.
And when AI assistants do the summarizing of entire chapters for the students, what kind of analysis is left for them to exercise?
In other words, even if the new tool offers college students a tool to reduce the time spent on searching for information and enables them to focus more on learning and understanding their study materials, both parts of the process are usually needed for full school experience.
A study by researchers at Swansea University showed earlier this year that disengaged students who don’t really like their degree programs are more likely to use AI tools for academic tasks.
In early 2023, soon after ChatGPT was introduced to the wider public, the tool, which could write anything from essays to poems to code, was blocked in New York City schools over cheating concerns.
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