Luke O’Neill has speculated he and other teachers could “be out of a job soon enough”. 

The Trinity Professor said advances in AI mean that the technology is increasingly being used by scientists and teachers in their work. 

On The Pat Kenny Show, Professor O’Neill gave, as an example, a new programme called ‘Co-Scientist’ being piloted by Google. 

“You have AI on your phone,” he said. 

“You have a scientific conversation with this bot, you discuss experiments, you discuss controls, read the literature, show the data to the ‘co-scientist’ and they tell you are you right or wrong. 

“So, in other words, it’s like your personal assistant.” 

Professor O’Neill continued that the BBC has used recordings of Agatha Christie’s voice in order to create a course on detective novel writing. 

“It’s the first time ever a dead person has been used in education,” he said. 

“It’s a deepfake; it’s fed into the machine, all of her writings and her novels, her interviews, her photographs. 

“Then an actress who looks like her - they modify the face a bit - gives the lecture course on how to write the most effective detective novels.” 

Agatha Christie. Picture by: Alamy.com.

Professor O’Neill added that AI has even started to teach lessons. 

“There’ll be a bot, a chat bot giving the lesson,” he said. 

“We’ve known for a long time, if the teacher is the same ethnicity as the student, the student learns more. 

“What about an eight-year-old child? You teach the eight-year-old child about snow and ice with Elsa from Frozen. 

“So, you create a character to teach the child about that." 

Third level

Professor O’Neill speculated this will likely be the case in universities as well. 

“I’m going to be out of a job soon enough,” he said. 

“You can imagine teaching immunology, you might get the world’s most famous immunologist as a deepfake to teach. 

“Einstein to teach relativity, Darwin to teach evolution, Picasso to teach painting. 

“This is actually what they’re exploring now.” 

Despite this, Professor O’Neill said he believes AI will not entirely replace teachers and they will instead be used to “enhance” education. 

“So, a teacher might well run 20 lessons with 20 different bots tailored to each student,” he said. 

“And afterwards then talk to the students and discuss it - that’s a possible future.”

Main image: Prof Luke O’Neill in the Newstalk Studio. Image: Newstalk