AI: Secret Invasion
15 Dec 2024
I. Introduction
Ai is a blessing to many students including I, but deep down we all know it’s a curse in disguise. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely is helpful, but most of the time, we don’t use it to learn, we use it to get grades. Throughout the semester, I have used chatGPT and GitHub co-pilot. This semester, I have been very AI tool-reliant. I used it more than the rest of my previous semester combined. Well, it’s because of this class. I’m not built for coding.
II. Personal Experience
Experience Wods
I didn’t use it in experience WODs because they were easy enough to do on your own, and I still had the learning mentality.
Inclass Practic3 Wods
I didn’t use it here because it’s not graded, there is no point in using it if it’s worth nothing. A terrible mistake on my part because I should have used it to learn the concept. Asking AI for the steps and explaining how it did it would have definitely helped me understand important concepts.
Essays
I only used it once, which was the ‘Till design do us part’. I only used it because I forgot about it. I mean the essay prompt was easy, I just didn’t have the energy to actually work on it. I already had the idea which was to be like a marriage and a breakup because it just made sense in my head. But even if I used it, it turned out to be very much fitting that I used AI.
Final Project
For the final project, it was mostly copy-and-paste. I copied and pasted from pretty much all the practice Wods, Wods, and especially the Application designs. Then I just change the variables and make them all match. If it didn’t work I used GitHub co-pilot to fix them and use it to format how I want the page to look like. I had no choice but to use a lot of it because I had to do 70% of the project. Everything on the search page including the student and company profile.
Tutorials
I never used it because there is no point, if I could not do any of the tutorial modules, I would have given up.
Answering a question in class or discord
Sometimes I used it to answer questions from my final project teammates when they asked questions through Discord.
Asking or answering smart-questions
I never used it because I never asked or answered a smart question.
Coding Examples
I don’t know what this is referring to, but since it’s an example, I probably no use it because I only use it if it’s graded.
Explaining Code
Yes, most definitely. Every time I try to learn coding, I always just copy and paste the code and ask chatGPT or GitHub co-pilot to explain it.
Writing Code
Yes, I use it to write code because as I stated, coding is not for me.
Documenting code
Yes, I use it to explain what a particular line of code does.
Quality Assurance
Yes, no doubt. I always use it every time I get an error on our project.
Assignment Modules
I never really used AI during assignment modules like the application design because the answer is already given, so I just watch it every time I get a problem.
III. Impact on Learning and Understanding
AI has definitely made me more lazy. Without AI, would be searching and searching through the internet for clues and concepts to learn. But now, the solution can be given to you by simply copying and pasting. There is no need to stress yourself by ravaging through endless threads of documents that may or may not be useful. Now, all it takes is one search and you have your solution.
IV. Practical Application
In this day of age, AI has been a controversy all over the world, especially in the Art department. Big corporations such as Marvel or Coca-Cola have used AI in their projects. The ‘Secret Invasion’ show from Marvel has used AI art for the intro of the show. Coke released an advertisement using AI. It might not relate to software engineering now but when AI has fully grasped the power of coding, many of software engineers may be replaced with AI just like the many animators and artists.
V. Challenge Opportunities
Upon using AI many times, I know that it lacks the support of imports. An AI cannot predict what components you import, so you have to copy the code of your imports too. So, if you have a lot of imports, then the solutions that the AI will give you will most likely be wrong because an AI also has limitation of what it can process at once. So, it’s best to let the AI explain the code, and see if you can solve it your self.
VI. Comparative Analysis
Traditional Teaching is mostly reliant on how good your lecturer is. If you have a bad lecturer who makes no sense and is entirely confusing then you will not learn anything. If your lecturer is good and actually gives examples and answers questions clearly, then AI will be completely useless. However, most lecturers I had so far, have been very confusing. One of my professors literally told us to watch videos he made 5 years ago, and in those videos, he talks so out of energy that it’s hard to pay attention, and it makes you sleepy. So, I have to use AI on his homework to explain how to do it.
VII. Future Consideration
I feel like AI will definitely take over the coding portions of all of Engineering Majors. Especially to the majors who are required to take coding classes even if their major itself requires no coding. I just hope that CS students don’t completely rely on AI because if so, then AI will be more powerful and powerful because using AI is how it learns, the more it is used the more efficient it becomes. Many jobs will switch to AI because it would be more efficient to and cost less than paying many employees than to just hire one person to use AI.
VIII. Conclusion
The use of AI is definitely becoming a problem. It’s hypocritical for me to say it but, I can’t lie to myself that I don’t see the problem in using. AI can be very useful to learn, but most of the time, it’s not how we use it. We see it as a shortcut to get the solution. We can only hope that lecturers become more engaging and actually teach concepts and with proper examples and explanation, then AI will be a second option.