Article by IMPA Tech professors and student debates the limits of AI

IMPA Tech professors Cilene Rodrigues and Rafael Beraldo, the institute’s skills development manager, in collaboration with student Kaio Costa, sign the article “Reflections on the nature and use of artificial intelligence“, published on Tuesday (20) in the Correio Braziliense newspaper. The text proposes a critical analysis of the growing appreciation of artificial intelligence (AI) and the possibilities that automation brings to everyday life, while at the same time drawing attention to the risk of emptying human knowledge.

The article is the result of an activity in the subject “English 1”, which took place in the first semester of 2025. At the time, Kaio interviewed the teachers, both linguists, to understand the impact of AI on foreign language teaching. The topic was motivated by the adoption of texts generated by artificial intelligence by the Duolingo platform and by recent statements by Luis von Ahn, the app’s founder and CEO, that AI systems would be more efficient than human teachers in language teaching, which generated intense debate in academic circles. Cilene, a columnist for the newspaper, invited the student and Professor Beraldo to turn the material into an article.

The teacher points out that the experience of writing in collaboration with students is especially enriching. “Not only because of the opportunity to teach them how to write an academic text, but also because we learn a lot from them. It’s a question of perspective. After being trained in academic activities, we develop a way of looking at doing science and its function. Students bring a different, more intuitive view. And intuition often helps us connect better with readers and engage the public. In this case, it’s also worth remembering that AI is both a problem and a solution for young people,” he said.

Throughout the text, the authors revisit historical milestones in the development of AI and analyze how technology has come to occupy a central role in activities traditionally associated with human cognitive abilities. One of the excerpts highlights this movement:

“Since its creation, artificial intelligence (AI) has had two major audience peaks. The first was in 1997, when the Deep Blue automaton, produced by IBM, defeated the then world champion Garry Kasparov in the game of chess. Today, we are bombarded with advertisements promoting the use of AIs in cognitive tasks. As a result, we delegate to these systems the production of texts, the solving of mathematical problems, artistic creations and even judgments about the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the ethical and the unethical. This scenario reinforces the perception that artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence in mental competence and performance, justifying its use on a large scale. Glued to technology, we experience a certain mental emptying, as we stop valuing the development of our own abilities and reflecting on the consequences of this process.”

The full article is available on the Correio Braziliense website.