(NewsNation) — Harvard University students learning to code will have a new instructor, one without physical form and powered by artificial intelligence.

The university plans to use an AI bot to help students learn coding in an introductory course. But the bot won’t be working alone.

Computer science Professor David Malan, who teaches at Harvard, said the AI is designed to assist students, not deliver complete answers for them. He said staff is also working to make the bot less helpful than tools like Chat GPT.

“We’ve been doing over the past few months is trying to teach the bot to be a little more like a teacher, leading you to an answer, but not just handing it to a student,” Malan said.

He said the AI will help answer frequent questions on online discussion boards and help students discover bugs in their code. Still, the tool isn’t perfect.

“Some of the early bumps in the road that we ran into were that it was less good at answering administrative questions, questions about deadlines or policies, because those things tend to change semester by semester,” Malan said.

In an effort to make sure students were receiving accurate information, Malan said human instructors would be able to monitor the software and they would limit where the AI scraped data.

“It’s very much access restricted to only being able to take input from a few different modes of technology,” Malan said.

While the AI tool will initially be used in computer science courses, Malan said the hope is that it can eventually be deployed to assist professors and teaching assistants in other fields as well.