Generational attitudes about A.I. in the classroom were turned on their head on Tuesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference. The Gen Zer was criticizing A.I. and ChatGPT-like tools and the boomer was defending them.
“I was a Chegg user but not because I gave a fuck about learning,” said Nadya Okamoto, a 25-year-old nonprofit founder who graduated from Harvard in 2021. “But because it gave me answers to problem sets. I meet a lot of young students out there that aren’t necessarily interested in using ChatGPT for learning. They’re using it because it makes it easier to complete homework.”
Dan Rosensweig, the 61-year-old CEO of education company Chegg, was onstage fielding her question. His company provides a subscription service that helps students with homework and studying and it’s been been threatened of late by the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, which provide the same service for free. In May, its stock price lost 49% of its value in minutes when, despite strong first quarter earnings, the company said its business was threatened by a “significant spike” of interest in generative A.I. from the students that make up its customer base. In his live interview with Fortune on Wednesday, Rosensweig referred to himself as the “poster child for getting your ass kicked by A.I.”
Rosensweig was attending Brainstorm Tech, in part, to announce the company’s foray into generative A.I. with virtual study assistant Cheggmate. But Okamoto, who founded Period, a nonprofit working to destigmatize periods and eliminate the tampon tax, was skeptical of Rosensweig’s hopes that Cheggmate or any other A.I. tools would be used exclusively in the pursuit of knowledge. These tools, she said, ultimately create little incentive for students to actively engage with their course materials.
“A concern of mine, as a Gen Z elder, is feeling like these sorts of tools are making it easier and easier to honestly just get the answers and deprioritize engaging curiosity,” Okamoto said.
Drawing on her own experiences, Okamoto shared how during her junior year she raised a pre-seed round for her startup, causing her to lose focus on her studies, and so she turned to Chegg because it was “easy” and “C’s get degrees.” Okamoto did not respond to a request for further comment.
Rosensweig countered that Okamoto was “thinking about it from the exact wrong way.” Explaining that Chegg was created for the type of student who doesn’t have the same level of resources that a student at an elite university does.
“So what the kids at Harvard did, I don’t give a shit about,” he said. “I care about the kids who are trying to make their life better.”
What Cheggmate could offer
Rosensweig talked onstage about his hopes for Cheggmate. “We will be able to know exactly what you’re learning on Tuesday of next week, and bring it to you in the format that you learn best in the language that you learn best at the level that you learn best, and prove to you that you are improving.”
To his credit, there will almost certainly be added benefits to a generative A.I. tool tailored specifically for helping students with schoolwork as opposed to something like ChatGPT or Bard, which were designed with broader applications in mind.
When he was answering Okamoto’s question about the dangers of such tools, Rosensweig said that his company serves students who have historically been “unsupported by [their] school system.” They also might have a slightly more unconventional college experience, needing to work 20 to 40 hours a week to afford school or might have kids that pull their attention away from their schoolwork.
He went on to call academic institutions “lazy,” chastising them for not updating their curricula, and professors for not writing more thoughtful exam questions that couldn’t be answered by a ChatGPT prompt.
“My view is we are built for the student that is self-initiated,” he said. “That wants to learn, and that needs to graduate with a skill.”
