So, before you get the wrong impression, I’m 40. Last year I enrolled in a master program in IT to further my career. It is a special online master offered by a university near me and geared towards people who are in fulltime employement. Almost everybody is in their 30s or 40s. You actually need to show your employement contract as proof when you apply at the university.
Last semester I took a project management course. We had to find a partner and simulate a project: Basically write a project plan for an IT project, think about what problems could arise and plan how to solve them, describe what roles we’d need for the team etc. Basically do all the paperwork of a project without actually doing the project itself. My partner wrote EVERYTHING with ChatGPT. I kept having the same discussion with him over and over: Write the damn thing yourself. Don’t trust ChatGPT. In the end, we’ll need citations anyway, so it’s faster to write it yourself and insert the citation than to retroactively figure them out for a chapter ChatGPT wrote. He didn’t listen to me, had barely any citation in his part. I wrote my part myself. I got a good grade, he said he got one, too.
This semester turned out to be even more frustrating. I’m taking a database course. SQL and such. There is again a group project. We get access to a database of a fictional company and have to do certain operations on it. We decided in the group that each member will prepare the code by themselves before we get together, compare our homework and decide, what code to use on the actual database. So far whenever I checked the other group members’ code it was way better than mine. A lot of things were incorporated that the script hadn’t taught us at that point. I felt pretty stupid becauss they were obviously way ahead of me - until we had a videocall. One of the other girls shared her screen and was working in our database. Something didn’t work. What did she do? Open a chatgpt tab and let the “AI” fix the code. She had also written a short python script to help fix some errors in the data and yes, of course that turned out to be written by chatgpt.
It’s so frustrating. For me it’s cheating, but a lot of professors see using ChatGPT as using the latest tools at our disposal. I would love to honestly learn how to do these things myself, but the majority of my classmates seem to see that differently.
I understand and agree.
I have found that AI is super useful when I am already an expert in what it is about to produce. In a way it just saves key strokes.
But when I use it for specifics I am not an expert in, I invariably lose time. For instance, I needed to write an implementation of some audio classes to use CoreAudio on Mac. I thought I could use AI to fill in some code, which, if I knew exactly what calls to make, would be obvious. Unfortunately the AI didn’t know either, but gave solutions upon solutions that “looked” like they would work. In the end, I had to tear out the AI code, and just spend the 4-5 hours searching for the exact documentation I needed, with a real functional relevant example.
Another example is coding up some matrix multiplications + other stuff using both the Apple Accelerate and the Cuda cublas. I thought to myself, “well- I have to cope with the change in row vs column ordering of data, and that’s gonna be super annoying to figure out, and I’m sure 10000 researchers have already used AI to figure this out, so maybe I can use that.” Every solution was wrong. Strangely wrong. Eventually I just did it myself- spent the time. And then I started querying different LLMs via the ChatArena, to see whether or not I was just posing the question wrong or something. All of the answers were incorrect.
And it was a whole day lost. It did take me 4 hours to just go through everything and make sure everything was right and fix things with testers, etc, but after spending a whole day in this psychedelic rabbit hole, where nothing worked, but everything seemed like it should, it was really tough to take.
So…
In the future, I just have to remember, that if I’m not an expert I have to look at real documentation. And that the AI is really an amazing “confidence man.” It inspires confidence no matter whether it is telling the truth or lying.
So yeah, do all the assignments by yourself. Then after you are done, have testers working, everything is awesome, spend time in different AIs and see what it would have written. If it is web stuff, it probably will get it right, but if it’s something more detailed, as of now, it will probably get it wrong.
Edited some grammar and words.