There are some human attributes robots could never replace - or at least that’s what you might hope

There are some human attributes robots could never replace - or at least that’s what you might hope

But one university has brought that into question by replacing one of their teaching assistants with a machine. And none of the students realized

Jill Watson, an IBM-designed bot, has been helping graduate students at Georgia Institute of Technology solve problems with their design projects since January

Responding to questions over email and posted on forums, Jill had a casual, colloquial tone, and was able to offer nuanced and accurate responses within minutes.Her replies included ’yep!’ and ’we’d love to’

Tyson Bailey began to wonder if Jill was a computer and posted his suspicions on Piazza

We were taking an AI course, so I had to imagine that it was possible there might be an AI lurking around,’ said Bailey, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico

It seemed very much like a normal conversation with a human being,’ Jennifer Gavin, one of the students, told the Wall Street Journal

Another student, Petr Bela, told the newspaper: ’Just when I wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA.’

The bot was named Jill Watson after the IBM Watson analytics system that all her responses come from - essentially her brain

She was trained by Georgia Tech researchers before being thrown into the mix with nine other TAs

Some students were suspicious at how swiftly she responded. And once she used the word ’design’ instead of ’project’. But none actually suspected she was a bot

And they said many of the TAs are sharp, impersonal, and quick to respond anyway

The experiment sent shockwaves through the tech industry, with many questioning the ethics of covertly inserting artificial intelligence into real-life situations

But Ashok Goel, the computer science professor who designed the project, insisted it was a worthwhile experiment - and Jill performed a necessary task

Students posted upwards of 10,000 messages on forums, taking up professors’ time with routine responses

One of the main reasons many students drop out is because they don’t receive enough teaching support

The bot has helped medical research teams diagnose illnesses in patients

According to Goel, Jill Watson’s capabilities were far more nuanced than that. She answers only to questions that she is 97 per cent certain of the answer to

Once Watson had a number of potential solutions, it was able to check against its database to make sure the answers made sense

Watson then evaluated the response and determined whether to virtually press the buzzer

The bot would then speak with an electronic voice synthesized from recordings that actor Jeff Woodman made for an IBM text-to-speech program in 2004