When going through the internet today, you might have stumbled upon the concept of AI-generated work. Whether that is art generated by AI instantly based on your description or AI-generated voices that sound nearly identical to the person it’s trying to impersonate, you can’t help but admire how far AI has come. It has become an essential tool in many applications and has helped me in many ways. From providing me with a code based on what I wanted to explain to me concepts that I need further understanding, AI has helped me in all these aspects. One specific AI tool that has helped me in my endeavors of ICS 314 is ChatGPT. It is one of the most used and accessible AI tools, where you tell and ask questions and it will provide a well-detailed answer. Even though AI is convenient and helpful, there are still many controversies surrounding the use of AI. Many state that the use of AI is morally wrong and that it is ruining the creativity of certain works, but overall AI is still relatively new and it will only grow as time goes on.
Despite the controversies, I still use AI tools like ChatGPT to help me finish work related to ICS 314. Although my usage of AI assistance programs is quite limited, I still want to fully understand and absorb the material. In addition, I’ve used ChatGPT for many applications but there are times when the use of AI is unnecessary and even at times completely wrong. There will be an instance where I ask AI to provide me a code for a certain prompt and it will provide me a perfect code for it, but there are times when it is so incorrect that it just makes me more confused than if I were to solve it on my own.
Overall, AI assistance programs like ChatGPT is a 50/50 and these are the instances of my usage of AI in ICS 314:
Experience WODs
In Experience WODs or assignments that we do in our own time, I would occasionally use AI. However, I only used AI at the beginning of this course, as later on I began to follow the video explanation that accompanied the assignment.
In-class Practice WODs
During the In-class practice WODs, I used AI at the beginning of this course, but overtime, I began to use it less. I found that the later material, the usage of AI wasn’t reliable as it would provide me solutions that didn’t meet my expectations/criteria.
In-class WODs
For In-class WODs, I used AI very heavily as I can’t properly think in a timed environment. If I was given double the time a normal WOD would give, I am sure that I could complete the WOD without the help of AI. However, I would like to point out that with the last few WODs, I didn’t use AI as the solutions that it provided weren’t useful.
Essays
When it came to writing essays for ICS 314, I never used AI to help me write one. Most of the essays that are generated from AI are pretty bad and don’t sound that good. In addition, the prompts for our essays weren’t that complicated and I had an easy time writing them.
Final Project
As of this moment, I haven’t used AI to help me with the final project as I haven’t found a need for it. However, as I began to start doing the more complicated parts, I might consider the use of AI.
Learning a concept/tutorial
When it comes to learning certain materials and content, I would occasionally use AI. If I didn’t fully understand a concept, I would ask ChatGPT to explain it in Minecraft terms and I would generally get a better understanding.
Answering a question in class or in Discord
I think there wasn’t a time when I would use AI to answer a question in class or in Discord. I believed that using AI to help someone didn’t seem right to me and I would rather rely on my own intuition than an answer provided by AI that I don’t understand.
Asking or answering a smart-question
I would occasionally use AI to answer questions that I didn’t fully understand. There are times when I would ask AI to further explain or analyze concepts that I was confused about.
Coding examples
When it came to asking AI for coding examples, the use of it at the beginning of the course was very helpful. It would usually provide me with a very accurate and correct code of the prompt that I asked. However, as the course went on and we began to deal with HTML, it became less reliable and I began to use it less often.
Explaining code
For explaining code, I didn’t really use AI that often. I don’t believe I used AI to explain code to me as most of the time, I would understand what my code or other code is trying to do. I would know what part of the code did what by just looking at it and even if I was confused, I would just go through the code step by step and understand what it did through that process.
Writing code
When it came to asking AI to write code for me, I would often use and rely on AI. I found it quite helpful when AI would provide me code snippets for prompts/assignments that I didn’t know where to start.
Documenting code
For documenting code, I never used AI as I found that documenting code was for my better understanding of the code that I made. I should be able to fully understand and explain what part of my code did what and its results.
Quality assurance
As for quality assurance, I didn’t really use AI to help me debug or fix errors as the answers that it did provide weren’t really that helpful. Also, I wanted to improve my debugging skills as knowing how to fix errors without the use of AI, seemed a lot more beneficial for me in the long run.
Other uses in ICS 314
Other than what has been stated above, I don’t think I used AI for anything other than helping me understand concepts and providing me with code.
When it came to my learning experiences, I would like to say that the usage of AI has significantly improved my understanding of concepts in this course. Due to how AI is so accessible and how AI is generally useful when it comes to explaining concepts when it came to topics that I was confused about, I found AI very helpful. Most of the time, AI would be able to fully explain concepts that I needed further clarification on. In general, I find AI a useful tool that has positively impacted my learning experiences..
As for the usage of AI outside of ICS 314, its application of it can be commonly seen in today’s society. As mentioned earlier, AI has the ability to create art or mimic people’s voices. Although this application of AI is within an ethical gray zone as there are a lot of controversies surrounding these concepts. For instance, the use of AI voice can at times sound way too real to the actual person, and that only can give you some ideas as to why it doesn’t seem ethically right. However, some applications of AI have been beneficial in the real world, specifically in transportation. AI has not only helped with the development of self-driving cars but completely improved it. To the point where a person no longer needs to be in the car to operate cars, people can have their cars drive to them even. All and all, there are still many applications of AI within the real world, all have been used to further the technology to help towards the development of society.
One of the many challenges that I had dealing with AI, specifically ChatGPT, was making prompts that I needed answered. My main issue was coming up with very specific prompts, although I would often first try copying and pasting the entire assignment into ChatGPT. There were times that this worked, but most of the time the result was often wrong or not very helpful. That’s why oftentimes I would put in a lot of time coming up with a prompt that was simple for ChatGPT but also included specific details that needed to be included with the answer. However, this introduces opportunities for prompt engineering. Within software engineering courses, there can be a course that teaches how to properly create prompts for AI for effective usage. Showing that a properly made prompt can provide the user with a perfect answer with the use of AI.
When it comes to traditional teaching methods there are many aspects that AI-enhanced approaches can’t compare to. Within the traditional teaching methods, like in-person lectures and the usage of presentations and textbooks, the one thing that AI can never be able to compare to traditional teaching methods is engagement. AI can never be able to create that hands-on feeling when it comes to learning. Being able to fully experience and absorb the content by seeing how things interact with one another. With AI, most of the time the content is given to you fully, without you being able to apply yourself to the material.
This also brings up the issue of gradually learning, and how AI will most likely have a hard time pulling this off. Within education most courses have a set amount of material to teach, where most have students learn concepts one at a time, slowly integrating more complex topics to further knowledge retention. However, AI tends to provide the information as a whole, providing the user with all the data it has on that specific topic. Showing how AI can’t provide that gradual steps of learning than traditional teaching methods.
With the increased use of AI in many aspects of daily life, I think the usage of AI in the future of software engineering education is guaranteed. The potential advancements that AI would bring in education could be generating assignments or practice exams. In addition, things like AI-generated responses that review student mistakes and possible improvements in their work. Even though there are some positive impacts that AI can have on education, there are still negative impacts that need to be considered. One instance is to address the ethical and controversial issues on the usage of AI. The education department needs to meet the middle ground between the use of AI for educational purposes and the usage of AI for complete work with no say in it. In general, integrated AI into the learning process of education is guaranteed and now it’s only a matter of time before these concepts need to be addressed.
When it comes to the application of AI, it opens up new opportunities and furthers developments in software engineering. With my experiences with AI and the usage of ChatGPT, these tools have been very useful and helpful for this course. It has allowed me to better understand concepts that I found confusing or was stuck on and has helped me develop simple codes. However, there are still issues and ethical problems that come with the usage of AI. Regardless, I think as time goes on, AI will develop into a necessary tool that can help students with many issues in a convenient and more accessible way. Similarly to when Google was first introduced, being able to search for anything at the convenience of any time and anywhere, AI tools like ChatGPT will be no different, which will become a necessary tool in the future. Overall, I believe that the usage of AI will eventually become a major part of the future and will help further development not only within software engineering but all aspects of society.