First student fully supervised by AI

by Bas Haring, Leiden University, the Netherlands.

At the end of the summer, just before the start of the new academic year, Alicia Cai graduated – a student of Chinese origin who studied Media Technology at Leiden University. Nothing remarkable in itself, were it not for the fact that Alicia is the first student ever whose graduation project was fully guided by AI. Except for the first two weeks, when I was her supervisor. In those weeks, I noticed that Alicia made an exceptional amount of progress, unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I asked her how that was possible, and she told me that she was constantly chatting with ChatGPT – and similar tools – about her research: receiving suggestions for research questions, critical comments about possible methods, and so on. All day long. I started to doubt my added value as a supervisor, and I made a list of tasks that a graduation supervisor typically has. It didn’t seem impossible to outsource a good part of that list to AI, and I then suggested to Alicia that she hand over the entire guidance to AI.

The goal of her research project was twofold: on the one hand, she would work on her original research theme, but on the other hand, she would also study what it was like to be supervised by AI. Alicia agreed, and she chose to be guided by a duo of ChatGPT and Claude.

Since then, I have only seen her again at her graduation presentation. (which I had to assess, along with her thesis, as I formally remained the supervisor.) In the meantime, I could follow her progress only through a shared document. We had no direct contact, but we agreed that we could both always stop the experiment at any given point.

Alicia has successfully graduated, and the guidance by AI has worked in that sense. But there are a number of remarks to be made. I would like to summarise the lessons that Alicia has learned as follows:

1. A significant advantage of AI over a human supervisor is its availability 24 hours a day and it is also less socially complex: AI is never grumpy, has no hidden agendas and has infinite patience.
2. AI is especially useful for facilitating dialogues: conversations that help the student conduct the research better. AI should not be used to take parts of the graduation process out of the student’s hands. (This is difficult to prevent in practice, even in the case of regular guidance.)
3. AI can help with structuring and improving written texts, and it can provide technical support, for example with programming or statistics.
4. AI can also assist with planning and monitoring progress, but the human aspect is missing here. For instance, a supervisor can look sternly at a student and admonish them; AI can’t or doesn’t. And in any case, it will be experienced differently.
5. AI is quite reasonable – perhaps better than expected – at providing moral support. Many students experience graduation as a lonely journey, and conversations with AI can provide relief.
6. But the most important comment that can be made is that “AI is not sufficiently able to reflect critically and academically on the graduation project. AI still has too superficial knowledge for that (at the moment), and insufficient “‘wisdom”. Moreover, most commercial AI tools are fairly affirmative in nature rather than critical. A student can certainly do something about that by explicitly giving AI the role of critic, but that requires discipline.

Overall, these lessons are quite positive, although the latter disadvantage weighs particularly heavily. The experiment has had a considerable impact (in the Netherlands): newspapers and other media reported on it, usually positively, but sometimes negatively.

I would like to make one point for clarification. This experiment is not intended to suggest that AI can take over the supervision of all students for an entire graduation project. The intention is to show that some of our academic work will probably change in nature; with this experiment, we were able to discover fairly quickly where suspected possibilities and impossibilities of AI can be found.