Symbiotic Intelligence and Supervision in the Education Sector

Can artificial intelligence (AI) serve as an academic supervisor for pupils, students, and PhD candidates?Is this a form of anthropomorphism?The answer depends on how we define "artificial intelligence" and "human, " and whether cognitive and intellectual capabilities are reserved exclusively for human beings.One of the first things that comes to mind with this thematic entry point is the lack of a conceptual apparatus that can adequately comprehend this current inflection point in AI development.It is easy to fall back on the human-versus-machine metaphor-but does that still hold today?In everyday discourse, it is quite common to assume a reductionist understanding of AI and large language models (LLMs), referring to them as merely technology, tools, or machines.This stands in contrast to the prevailing assumption that AI must constantly be compared to human abilities.One can thus ask whether this assumption and such reductionism truly grasp what LLMs are and what they are capable of.In both my AI book (Krumsvik, 2023a) and in an AI article (Krumsvik, 2023c), I argue that while this dichotomy may be understandable in everyday language, it becomes more problematic in academic discourse.All too often, such comparisons are based on a classic circular argument, where the conclusion is presupposed by the premise:Premise: "Thinking" is defined as something only humans do.Conclusion: AI cannot think, because it is not human.The conclusion logically follows, but only because the premise already assumes the outcome.Regardless of the capabilities AI demonstrates, the definition itself ensures the desired result.This is known as petitio principii, or begging the question, and such reasoning downplays what AI may actually be capable of.To reserve the term "thinking" for humans is a matter of definition; functionally, models like o3 already perform many of the operations we associate with thinking.Just as a helicopter can "fly" without flapping its wings like a bird, o3 can "think" without functioning like a human brain.