I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.
Real talk though, I’m seeing more and more of my peers in university ask AI first, then spending time debugging code they don’t understand.
I’ve yet to have chat gpt or copilot solve an actual problem for me. Simple, simple things are good, but any problem solving i find them more effort than just doing the thing.
I asked for instructions on making a KDE Widget to get weather canada information, and it sent me an api that doesn’t exist and python packages that don’t exist. By the time I fixed the instructions, very little of the original output remained.
As a prof, it’s getting a little depressing. I’ll have students that really seem to be getting to grips with the material, nailing their assignments, and then when they’re brought in for in-person labs… yeah, they can barely declare a function, let alone implement a solution to a fairly novel problem. AI has been hugely useful while programming, I won’t deny that! It really does make a lot of the tedious boilerplate a lot less time-intensive to deal with. But holy crap, when the crutch is taken away people don’t even know how to crawl.
One major problem with the current generation of "AI"seems to be it’s inability to use relevant information that it already has to assess the accuracy of the answers it provides.
Here’s a common scenario I’ve run into: I’m trying to create a complex DAX Measure in Excel. I give ChatGPT the information about the tables I’m working with and the expected Pivot Table column value.
ChatGPT gives me a response in the form of a measure I can use. Except it uses one DAX function in a way that will not work. I point out the error and ChatGPT is like, "Oh, sorry. Yeah that won’t work because [insert correct reason here].
I’ll try adjusting my prompt a few more times before finally giving up and just writing the measure myself. It does not have the ability to reason that an answer is incorrect even though it has all the information to know that the answer is incorrect and can even tell you why the answer is incorrect. It’s a glorified text generator and is definitely not “intelligent”.
It works fine for generating boiler plate code but that problem was already solved years ago with things like code templates.
AI has absolutely wasted more of my time than it’s saved while programming. Occasionally it’s helpful for doing some repetitive refactor, but for actually solving any novel problems it’s hopeless. It doesn’t help that English is a terrible language for describing programming logic and constraints. That’s why we have programming languages…
The only things AI is competent with are common example problems that are everywhere on the Internet. You may as well just copy paste from StackOverflow. It might even be more reliable.
