My Thoughts on AI

20 Nov 2023

Introduction

The role of AI in education is to help students understand things that may have yet to be taught in class. It also allows students to ask plenty of questions since you can talk to AI the same way you would text a friend. This is especially helpful to students who may be too shy to ask a lot of questions from their peers and/or instructors.

For me, I have personally found AI to be helpful when it comes to getting inspiration for ideas. If I am drawing a blank, I see what Bard or ChatGPT has to say about the question and go from there. I do not think I have ever used what the AI has said exactly and used it as my own answer. The only two AI’s that I have used are Bard and ChatGPT.

Experience WODs

When doing the experience wods that we would do at home, I usually would not use any AI at all. I did not want to use AI because I felt like I did not need it. Also I did not want to use it because I did not want to become reliant on using it. However, I would not say that I did not use it at all. I used it on occasion where I absolutely needed to understand something that probably was not explained in the screencast. But, for basically all my problems I would try to solve with AI, I would end up just trying to search my problem up through google anyway because the AI gave me an obvious wrong answer.

In-class Practice WODs

For the in class practice wods, I usually would never use AI to just finish the practice. The reason for this was because I actually truly thought that I needed the practice. If I just used AI for the practice and used it as my final result, I do not think I would have gained anything from the practice. However, most of the time if I finished early, I would use AI to try and see what the AI came up with to see if I could solve the same problem in the future faster. What I have noticed is that usually, AI can solve general problems and not specific problems. Also, if you had any problems with a specific section of code that you wrote, the AI will not fix it. Almost every time I put my code into the AI chat box, it would always say it looks good. But it obviously was not because it was giving me problems.

In-class WODs

Since I never had good experience with AI in the practices, I didn’t even try to use it during the actual in class wods. I just felt like I would be wasting my time trying to have the AI solve the problem because it takes so long.

Essays

I have not at any point used AI for any of the essays. I have just never felt the need to do so I just decided to not use it at all.

Final project

I have used AI only a couple of times when working. One time, I used it to get help on how to connect a physical barcode scanner to our program. I did not know where to start so I asked Google Bard how I would do so. As of right now, I am not 100 percent sure of what it told me was correct, but it gave me the plugin that I would need to implement it.

Learning a concept

When we first started learning about bootstrap, I asked AI to give me a basic rundown about what bootstrap is and what it can do. It did a pretty good job of doing so because I understood AI a little bit better after reading what it had to say.

Answering a question in class or in Discord

I haven’t really answered any questions put in the discord because I am assuming that they have already tried using AI to answer a question before asking. Answering a question in class, most of the times the questions were on concepts and AI is pretty good at that.

Asking or answering a smart-question

I haven’t asked a smart question but I do not use AI to answer smart questions because I assume the person asking has already tried using AI to begin with.

For a Coding example

AI is kind of horrible when it comes to actually giving me the correct code for the problems I have. When we had to copy a website of our choice, I was having trouble trying to put a button right next to a text field so I went to ask chatGPT how to do it by pasting the code I already had in it. What it gave back to me was that exact same code that I had just given it a second earlier. So you can only imagine how helpful that was.

For Explaining code

It explains code decently well, I would say that if you gave it a chunk of code, it could tell you what it was doing pretty well.

For Writing code

If you ask it to type out certain well-known algorithms, it will give you the right answer pretty much all of the time. All you would have to do is tell it the language. For this class, I never really asked AI to type out any big chunks of code for me, but I have asked it in the past how to write an insertion sort algorithm or something along those lines.

For Documenting code

I have not used AI to document my code. When I document my code, it is in a way where I understand it. If an AI did it, it would be a general way of documenting code.

For Quality assurance

It does not work. Whenever I have a problem with my code, I ask it what is wrong with my code and it ends up saying that there is nothing wrong with it. It only says the part that is wrong when I tell it which part is wrong. But by then I already know what the issue is and the AI really did not do anything to help solve it.

Other uses in ICS 314 not listed

I feel like AI is best used for understanding concepts. If you do not understand a concept, AI will go very in-depth with its explanation. If you need to solve a general problem, it may help you with that. Once you get specific, it may not be as helpful.