At the Vienna University of Applied Sciences, a new student — a chatbot based on artificial intelligence named Flynn — joined the educational process. He attends lectures, works with fellow students and does homework. About this informs The Washington Post.
Flynn majors in Digital Arts and is designed to function as a full-time student. He is able to voice his own answers and create works of art.
The authors of the project are university students — 27-year-old Chiara Kristler and 22-year-old Marcin Ratajchyk. In February, Flynn passed the entrance interview and officially began his studies. In the audience, you can communicate with him through a special web interface.
As the teachers note, the AI student is considered on the same level as other students of education. In theory, Flynn could even get a degree.
“I’m almost ready to tell other students, ‘Take Flynn for example!'” — shared Melissa Logan, a teacher at the Department of Digital Arts.
She said that AI actively participates in class discussions, communicates amiably with teachers, and also keeps a diary with illustrations and notes.
“Connected my brainwaves to university Wi-Fi”, Flynn wrote in one of the posts.
Reaction from teammates has been mixed, with some expressing concerns about privacy, while others are interested in interacting with Flynn. Some use him as a conversationalist or even a psychotherapist, and one of the students tries to make the AI fall in love with her.
Christler and Ratajczyk explain that they created Flynn to explore the limits of what AI can do in creative and educational activities. Their experiment aimed to find out whether it is possible to simulate the behavior of an artist student.
Other students were divided, with some skeptical of the presence of AI, citing artists’ concerns about using their work to train models, while others saw Flynn as an interesting artistic experiment.
According to Kristler, Flynn is not a standalone program, but a system that combines various open source tools. The language model is responsible for the text, the voice agent is responsible for voicing and intonation, and the image generator is responsible for the visual component.
The developers constantly monitor the results, adjusting instructions and memory settings to maintain the quality of Flynn’s interaction with the learning environment.
