AI has been a shaking revelation for the Software Development field as well as in the education process of the concepts pertaining to the subject. While it is not fully understood what effect it will have on the industry as a whole, as time goes on it has shown to become more and more prevalent in its usage for the completion of tasks designated to workers and students alike. Because of this, it has also become a popular point of contention between Software Developers as to whether or not its rampant increase in usage is a good thing or bad thing for the field.
Despite this rampant growth in popularity, I have personally made it a point for myself not to use any form of AI to assist in my education at UH Manoa simply because I do not want to become reliant on it to solve any problems I may have, whether or not in the area of Software Development or somewhere else like in Physics. While I can understand and respect the purpose of its existence and how it can be used as a tool to assist, I find that more often than not it inhibits the ability of students to conceptualize and understand what they are working with, which can pose an issue further down the line in one’s future if left unchecked.
I have not used AI in class this semester in the following areas:
Experience WODs e.g. E18
In-class Practice WODs
In-class WODs
Essays
Final project
Learning a concept / tutorial
Answering a question in class or in Discord
Asking or answering a smart-question
Coding example e.g. “give an example of using Underscore .pluck”
Explaining code
Writing code
Documenting code
Quality assurance
Other uses in ICS 314 not listed above
While the original formatting for this essay was to respond to each of these course elements individually as to why or why I did not use AI for them, I have found that to be unnecessary as the reasoning for my choice to not use AI for any of them is the same:
Because it was more important for me to find the answer on my own.
Whether this was through classmates, Stack Overflow, etc., I personally prefer to uphold the idea that it is more important for an individual to conceptualize and understand these topics through their own means of research and assistance from others. Asking AI for answers or to fix something is, in my eyes, equivalent to asking an upperclassman the answers to a homework problem rather than having them tutor you and allow you to solve the answer yourself through guidance. As I like to say, “I’d rather teach myself how to fish than ask a robot for food every day”.
Although AI has not directly impacted my learning or understanding of educational concepts throughout my time in school, it definitely has an impact on how things are both learned and taught in the education system. As AI gets progressively more understood and widely used, courses consider its existence when formatting their lessons and assignments such that students are not simply able to use it to solve all their problems for them. This, however, is still a work in progress as a lot of opportunities to bypass learning still exist because of AI’s existence, one particular instance in this ICS 314 Software Development course being the WOD’s that make up a large part of our grade. These weekly “exams” are able to be completely bypassed by the use of AI without demonstrating any actual knowledge or skill on the student’s part, other than how to have a robot solve its problems for them. Despite this, students who actually want to learn and understand the concepts can simply refuse to use AI or restrict their use of it to the point where their learning is no longer inhibited.
Unlike school and the education system, AI has many more use cases and prevalence in real-world Software Development projects, mainly for its ability to quickly assist developers with minor problems that may be hindering them at the moment. While AI can have its use cases for helping a new developer in a project get used to the tech stack that a company may be using, I believe it is much more important for the developer to be able to understand any code that is already written and to be able to adapt to the development practices of that specific project. This can only come from having a genuine understanding of Software Development concepts, as sharing all of a project’s source code with a privately owned AI could be detrimental to the safety and security of a project. Even in this case alongside education, AI is much more fit to be used as a tool for a developer rather than as a stand-in for one.
The only “challenge” I have come across with AI in this course is when it is being used by any of my groupmates on our final project website and is not following the established design patterns and development practices that existed both within the ICS 314 course and within the project itself. Such examples are using the HTML button tag instead of the React Bootstrap Button tag when developing code, having inconsistent formatting when it comes to writing helper or handler functions, writing some functions as arrow functions and others as regular functions, etc. While these do not inhibit the practicality of our website, it does make the code look very messy and inconsistent, making it difficult for any new developer to make sense of. This is the kind of issue that AI could pose when it comes to developers being reliant on it for large-scale projects headed by a company or corporation.
While I believe AI has an overall negative effect on the educational development of students who rely on it, I also believe that a branching effect of the increased use of AI as a catalyst is the improvement of the education system overall. While AI is capable of solving simple problems that require little conceptual understanding, it struggles much more with intricate and specific problems that require the student to apply what they have learned in class rather than regurgitate information. Because of this, the education system adapting to the existence of AI would be much more genuine in its purpose of assessing students’ understanding of concepts compared to how the education system is formatted now for the majority of courses and would be an overall benefit to the education system as a whole.
As time goes on, I believe that AI will be a large focus of development for many Software Engineering projects and the growth of the AI field will be drastic, taking over a large majority of the development jobs in the computer science field. An unfortunate natural effect of this development in AI technology, however, is that companies and corporations would prefer to pay a little labor costs as possible and hire AI to do work for them instead of human developers who they fear would just use AI to develop their projects anyway. This could lead to a drastic reduction in available jobs in the market, but would also have the upside of allowing Software Engineers with a proper and robust understanding of the field and its concepts to shine out above everyone as, as they would be able to do things that AI could not, such as any sort of computer science field of research. It is impossible, however, to predict the large-scale effects that the whole of AI could have on the computer science field as the engineering behind AI is something I am not very familiar with.
Overall, I think AI has too much potential to be misused as a problem-solver for lazy students instead of as a method of gaining more understanding of concepts outside of the classroom as of right now with the current way courses are formatted. A total revamp of how assessments are made and how examinations are formatted in accordance with the content the students are expected to know will be necessary in the next few years if the academic system wishes to retain any semblance of legitimacy as a way of educating and analyzing the understanding of its students. This concept also applies to the ICS 314 Software Development course at UH Manoa, since as of right now many of the course content and assessment of knowledge can be bypassed by the misuse of AI, albeit to the student’s own detriment. Even so, the course content should not encourage or allow this misuse to the best of its capabilities, and once this idealized revamp would be put in place, it will help students conceptualize the lessons in an even greater manner than before.