Throughout going through my ICS 314 course, we were allowed to use AI, under the conditions that we were honest about it. The reason for this was likely due to the ever increasing prominence within the field of software engineering, as it’s being use more and more commonly to debug, write, and even teach code. Because of this, it’s become more of a tool to help us when going through the class. However, because it’s a tool that was frequently used, it’s worth momentarily reflecting on what we used it for, and how it could’ve affected our ability to learn the material, which is what the purpose of this essay will serve.
To document this effectively, I’m gonna quickly break down each section of the class, and describe how I used AI in them. There are many sections, but I will try to keep it brief. For now, we start with…
AI was used in these WODS mostly to help me debug and clean up code to appease linting.
AI wasn’t used as frequently for these because we were given a solution to follow for these, so if I ever got lost, I deferred to the video. Only if I was lost in both the code and video, did I then defer to AI.
AI was used for these, but mostly only for tasks that were repetitive - I did my best to keep the AI usage minimum for that reason, as these were meant to be a test of our knowledge.
No AI was used. AI doesn’t make for a fun reading experience in my mind, and it’s more insightful to speak from the heart.
AI was definitely used for this in order to implement some parts of the project that were things we could theorhetically do, but didn’t necessarily know how to do. An example of this would be that I added an interactable map for one of my pages - a task not taught to us, but was useful for what we were trying to do.
AI was absolutely used for this. Because there were growing pains when handling new software in the practice WODS, learning how to set up the environment was always a struggle, and this eased that a lot.
In a similar vein to the essays, asking a question in plain understandable language is more useful than fancifying it through AI, so no AI was ever used.
Just as fancifying questions in discord isn’t the most useful, asking questions in general also doesn’t need to be thoroughly altered through AI, so none was used.
AI was used for this mostly to help assist with thinking of alternative ways to approach a problem.
AI was used for this. Sometimes you get completely lost with what you’re doing, and this is an easy way to catch you up.
I definitely did do this, but mostly as a break glass if needed type thing.
A lot of the time when you generate code, it also has a good habit of generating useful comments along with the bulk of the code. So I did do this, but not ever intentionally.
I did this this, but mostly to help appease lint.
Most of the AI use was limited to the above mentioned uses, so I can’t really say I used AI for many other uses throughout the class.
AI was super helpful in establishing and solidifying concepts that were crucial to succeed in this class. I had quite a ton of trouble personally with learning PostGRESQL, so AI did prove to be very beneficial in getting it down. As such, this leads to my main point - that if you use AI as a proper teacher, it can be super beneficial in your own growth. This does have it’s challenges though, but in order to get there, it is useful to consider practical uses of AI, so that we can then use both the perspective of education and work as a means of understanding how AI can be a drawback.
Because AI is very versitile, it very likely can be used in a large variety of ways. An example that I can think off the top of my head is that AI can be used to catch miniscule, otherwise undetectable things in a medical field, something which can be used to save lives. With AI, the limit is only our imagination, as I’m almost certain we’ve only barely scratched the surface with what AI can be used for. However, with these variety of use cases comes an ethical challenge.
AI is undeniably helpful, but it can very easily be exploited. This exploitation poses a ton of existential questions about both work and education, as AI does prove that if it gets too good, then it can perform at the skill of a professional. And if it performs at the skill of a professional, then the tried and true talents of the field will become obsolete, as AI can do what they do for less.
In a more educational lens, it also poses the challenge of creating a false sense of security. Because a person goes through courses and passes them all with the help of AI, it can create an illusion which tells the person that they are good at programming, which can be dangerous once they get into the professional world and start to fold. Both of these challenges are tough and don’t necessarily have the cleanest of answers, but because of those considerations, I personally view knowledge as ever more important. If ChatGPT has an outage, and you don’t know what you’re doing, then you are not going to be able to finish the assignment.
AI will only get better. Because of this, whether we like it or not, it will find its way into our lives. I believe that because of this, it’s useful to learn how to strike a balance of using AI as a helper, but not a substitute. By doing this, we may potentially be able to work to a more optimal world.
Though AI can be very useful in helping a student reap the benefits of learning from a class, the risks that arise from doing so are dangerous. I personally did use a bit of AI in this class, and it did help me learn concepts which were hard. But, I also recognize that it comes at a risk, one which I’m yet to see how it affects me later on.