Is AI going to take over real estate education?
Is AI going to take over the legal landscape in real estate? Is it going to replace real estate agents? Here, I’m Danny Naylor. I’m with the Institute of Real Estate and I was looking at two situations dealing with education specifically in real estate law where AI was used and totally in a good way, but also sort of highlighted some of its limitations that are still out there.
One example was I was helping to write a real estate license exam and we used AI to generate some new questions on specific topics and it was really cool that it could pull up questions and answers, right answers and wrong answers, you know, to make a four answer multiple choice question and a lot of that is really cool how fast it puts it together, really useful to get things done, but then we went through as humans, as experts, as educators and reviewed each of these questions and some of them were good, some of them were well written and we could use on the exam, but some of them were missing some of the nuance and some of them were just outright wrong.
AI doesn’t interpret law like we do
It’s even though the AI has access to the law and rules, sometimes it doesn’t always interpret the way those interact together appropriately. So even though AI was a very useful tool for helping write that exam, we did find that having the human oversight and the human review of it helped us to more appropriately design those questions for the intended purpose of the exam. First of all, to have accurate questions, you know, that reflect the real law, but also to reflect the intent of the law.
Sometimes if you go off just the letter you miss a little bit of the nuance and the way society works and you don’t want to miss out on that. When we’re teaching real estate to people, one of the hardest things that we have difficulty teaching is basically how to do the right thing. Laws are supposed to help us do that, but laws are sort of reactive where they see something was done wrong and so they write a lot to stop it, but oftentimes those are not perfect laws and so we’re sort of managing this kind of nuance between how to write the perfect thing but still allow for everyone to do everything they need to do.
And so that nuance is a place where the AI was not able to write questions that address that. We want questions that reinforce the right thing to do, even if it’s not specifically written in law. We can only test on what’s in the law, but the way we word the questions can reinforce the right kind of behavior that we want, which allows us to have a more open market and don’t have to write as many laws.
If everybody was doing the right thing, then we wouldn’t have to write as many laws, I guess you could say, right? Even though that’s all a little bit subjective.
Student used AI to study for the real estate license exam
The second one was kind of a similar situation. I had a student, he was studying for the real estate license exam.
He’s been through our course. He was using AI to generate practice exams for himself and again, same issue. I was reading some of the practice exams that he was working on and some of those had questions that were not written in a way that would help convey the right message and so it’s a little bit of a risk to have the AI generate practice materials when you’re working specifically on a license type exam.
An Expert can help when AI gets it wrong
Just another word of caution. AI is a super awesome tool and I do use it myself, but you still need a human review on a lot of those things. Make sure that you have an expert.
Make sure that you trust human experts and that we, even us experts, make sure we check ourselves. We’ll see you out there!
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