Sep 29, 2026 · 1 hr 20 min · 13 segments
Is AI ruining education or could it be the best thing to happen to it in decades? Dr. Mark Guadagnoli talks with Dr. Chad Lane (University of Illinois, director of the $20M NSF-funded Invite…
Mark GuadagnoliHost
Obviously, I hadn't thought about it before, but the interaction and also even simply the lag that you would have in a response, like AI phone systems now, there's a lag in response.
But if you have two systems that are working, it wouldn't feel like that at all.
What are some of the metrics, some of the findings that you got from having the twins?
So, so you got to remember at the time, AI, a lot of people had very vague notions of it.
So the Terminator, everybody thinks of AI as the Terminator is some, some, some insanely intelligent computer that wants to, wants to get us.
Um, So there was a really interesting finding that we did pre- and post-test surveys of museum visitors, and we saw a significant decline in fear of AI.
So they came in with this kind of like flawed, generic idea of AI as something that's dangerous.
And they left with a deeper understanding of it because we had this unique part of the exhibit where you could talk to the twins and then walk around to the side.
And then there you could watch the screens where it was working, where it would do the automated speech recognition and the dialogue management and the question and answer searching.
So like anything, once you understand it better, once you lift the hood and show people how it works, fear is just going to go down.
We also found that people were very interested in asking personal questions of AI.
Do you have boyfriends? What do you eat? They would hammer these twins on this personal side.
Obviously, I hadn't thought about it before, but the interaction and also even simply the lag that you would have in a response, like AI phone systems now, there's a lag in response.
But if you have two systems that are working, it wouldn't feel like that at all.
What are some of the metrics, some of the findings that you got from having the twins?
So, so you got to remember at the time, AI, a lot of people had very vague notions of it.
So the Terminator, everybody thinks of AI as the Terminator is some, some, some insanely intelligent computer that wants to, wants to get us.
Um, So there was a really interesting finding that we did pre- and post-test surveys of museum visitors, and we saw a significant decline in fear of AI.
So they came in with this kind of like flawed, generic idea of AI as something that's dangerous.
And they left with a deeper understanding of it because we had this unique part of the exhibit where you could talk to the twins and then walk around to the side.
And then there you could watch the screens where it was working, where it would do the automated speech recognition and the dialogue management and the question and answer searching.
So like anything, once you understand it better, once you lift the hood and show people how it works, fear is just going to go down.
We also found that people were very interested in asking personal questions of AI.
Do you have boyfriends? What do you eat? They would hammer these twins on this personal side.
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