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https://theconversation.com/i-got-an-ai-to-impersonate-me-and-teach-me-my-own-course-heres-what-i-learned-about-the-future-of-education-262734>
"Imagine you had an unlimited budget for individual tutors offering
hyper-personalised courses that maximised learners’ productivity and skills
development. This summer I previewed this idea – with a ridiculous and
solipsistic test.
I asked an AI tutor agent to play the role of me, an Oxford lecturer on media
and AI, and teach me a personal master’s course, based entirely on my own work.
I set up the agent via an off-the-shelf ChatGPT tool hosted on the Azure-based
Nebula One platform, with a prompt to research and impersonate me, then build
personalised material based on what I already think. I didn’t tell the large
language model (LLM) what to read or do anything else to enhance its
capabilities, such as giving it access to learning materials that aren’t
publicly available online.
The agent’s course in media and AI was well structured – a term-long, original
six-module journey into my own collected works that I had never devised, but
admit I would have liked to.
It was interactive and rapid-fire, demanding mental acuity via regular switches
in formats. It was intellectually challenging, like good Oxford tutorials
should be. The agent taught with rigour, giving instant responses to anything I
asked. It had a powerful understanding of the fast-evolving landscape of AI and
media through the same lens as me, but had done more homework.
This was apparently fed by my entire multimedia output – books, speeches,
articles, press interviews, even university lectures I had no idea had even
been recorded, let alone used to train GPT-4 or GPT-5.
The course was a great learning experience, even though I supposedly knew it
all already. So in the inevitable student survey, I gave the agentic version of
me well-deserved, five-star feedback."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
