Students must develop their reasoning skills as AI is increasingly able to produce clean outputs, writes Chrysanthos Dellarocas (Boston University). Dellarocas writes that generative AI has separated the creation of work from the competency behind it, and asserts that education must combat this by teaching students how to frame problems to bring in particular information using AI, and interpret AI outputs to identify if the information the tool has brought in actually answers their questions. Dellarocas describes some of the ways he has shifted his class to focus on reasoning over outputs. “The answer is the hardest thing to teach: genuine understanding, deep enough to know when the artifact in front of you is right, and what to do when it isn’t,” writes Dellarocas.
