AI and bad math

What we're going to see in this video is that the current versions of artificial intelligence are not always perfect at math, and we're going to test this out. I created a simple math tutor on Chat GPT here, and what we're going to do is see if it can help us with this problem here.

So let's say we wanted help with the following equation. Cool! Let's start by moving everything to one side of the equation so it equals zero. Can you do that? All right, maybe I'll subtract five from both sides and I would get x^2 + 3x. If I subtract 5 from 2, it's going to be -3, and then that equals 0.

All right, now I know what the right answer is, but let's just say that I'm an algebra student and I thought I did the right thing. But the AI is saying, "Looks like there was a little mix-up with the numbers there. If we're moving five to the left side from the original equation, and this was the original equation, it should be subtracted from the two. What does that give us?"

Well, if I subtract 5 from 2, I get -3. So this is looking fishy here: x^2 plus I'm just going to rewrite the same thing again, minus 3 is equal to zero. Oops, my mistake there. You got it right!

Now we have x^2 + 3x - 3 equals 0. To solve this quadratic equation, can you think of a method we could use? So that was an example where the AI clearly made a mistake. Now, I knew what it was supposed to be, so I knew it was making a mistake. But you could imagine if this is the first time that you're learning how to solve this type of equation, you might not recognize that.

So what I would recommend that you do is the moment that the AI feels like it's not giving you good feedback, if it feels like it's getting confusing, talk to someone else. Talk to your teacher, talk to a parent about what's going on. These tools are very powerful; they can be very useful, especially for you to understand a lot of concepts.

On platforms like Conmigo, which we do at K Academy, we've been able to get the math errors much lower than what you might see, for example, here on Chat GPT. But you can even have errors there. So even though these tools can be very powerful and can really help you understand concepts and even do the math, in most cases, it's not always going to be perfect.

So if you get in a situation where you're doing the right thing and it says at first that you're wrong, maybe it even sticks to the fact that you're wrong. Or maybe you are wrong and it's saying you're right. But just feel like this is not a constructive conversation for you. Remember, you always have— or hopefully you will have—other resources. Talk to your teachers or someone else to get more support.

The other thing I'd recommend is to restart the conversation with the AI and try to approach it from a different angle, as opposed to going back and forth with the AI once it's already gotten into a weird place.