Aleksei V. Mantylenko

The rapid development of digital technologies has constantly opened up new opportunities for the educational system, while simultaneously issuing a number of new challenges and threats to its development. A new technology that is now actively being introduced into various spheres of life is artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The main vector that digital transformation has always set is the transfer of routine operations from humans to machines. In an educational context, this function of digital devices has been referred to as “increasing productivity and performance.” For example, the need to write lecture notes by hand has been replaced by digital function to translate the teacher’s voice into text using any smartphone, and the labor-intensive task of writing original text can now be easily solved using a bot based on AI technology. However, quite reasonable concerns have always accompanied this process of change, since in addition to productivity, the effectiveness of methods, techniques and means used has always been a relevant and even more important task in education. If in the early stages of digitalization (computerization and automation) of education, concerns were formed around the possibility of replacing the role of the teacher with a computer, now in the context of threats we are more likely talking about the ethical issues of using AI in the educational process, and as a consequence, the effectiveness of learning activities and the quality of the education received. The research purpose of this work is to study the existing experience of using AI technology by students using the example of universities in the Samara region to understand the nature of this process and the new challenges that arise in this context for the educational system as a whole. The theoretical implication of the study lies in generalization of up-to-date scientific works on the problem of using AI in education, comprehension of the essence of AI technology itself, opportunities and threats that arise in relation to the introduction of AI in education. The practical significance of the work is determined by finding problematic aspects in the use of AI by modern students, on the one hand, and determining some growth points that can move the Russian education to a new level of development through the application of modern technological innovations, on the other.