Last year I was a third year student at Rotterdam School of Management who followed the Data Analyst track for Business Administration. During this period we used a lot of R Studio for our courses. For me, R Studio was a program that was useful when I had a well understanding of the prompts I was using, but when we learned something new I sometimes struggled. Using ChatGPT as a coding assistant helped me understood code way faster since I could ask ChatGPT to write a code with a specific prompt or even explain a line of code to me that I did not understand.
During a workshop in may of one of the programming courses I asked ChatGPT to make a training and testing data set.
ChatGPT, being especially good in coding, quickly gave me a response that showed me a good example of how making a training and testing data set was done.
Some experts believe ChatGPT has the potential to be the biggest disruptive technology of the century (Connected World, 2023). The moment I found out about ChatGPT and started using it as an assistant, I could understand why. Disruptive innovation refers to the process of transforming an expensive or highly sophisticated product, offering, or service into one that is simpler, more affordable, and accessible to a broader population (Twin, 2023). ChatGPT has the capacity to revolutionize several industries by automating mundane and repetitive tasks while providing human-like quality interactions (Connected World, 2023). By doing this ChatGPT makes products and services from these several industries accessible to a broader population.
What was the first moment you found out about ChatGPT and how did u started using it? Are you also using ChatGPT as an assistant or are you sceptical about ChatGPT’s output? I would love to know more about your firsthand experiences with ChatGPT. Let me know in the comments!
References:
Connected World. (2023). ChatGPT: The most disruptive tech of the century? Connected World – IoT and Digital Transformation. https://connectedworld.com/chatgpt-the-most-disruptive-tech-of-the-century/
Twin, A. (2023). Disruptive Innovation: Meaning and Examples. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/disruptive-innovation.asp#:~:text=Disruptive%20innovation%20refers%20to%20the%20process%20of%20transforming%20an%20expensive,accessible%20to%20a%20broader%20population.
I can very much relate to your findings regarding the use of ChatGPT in general and more specifically with coding tasks. I have started using ChatGPT within a few weeks after it being released and I am using it almost on a daily basis for work and privately since then.
It helped me tremendously at the start of the year where I transitioned roles in a company and found myself learning PowerBI. In order to do analysis in Power BI, so called DAX measures have to me written, which are in the programming language m which I was not familiar with. With my understanding of other programming languages like Python, Java and MySQL and the ability to let ChatGPT write m code for me based on natural language prompts, I was able to immediately conduct analysis with DAX measures. It was incredible to see how prompts got covered into multiple lines of code that oftentimes directly worked. Even when not immediately working, entering the error code into ChatGPT, usually provided fixed code which would work.
Very interesting and useful way to use ChatGPT.
I had a bit of a different experience when doing my bachelor thesis with it. I started learning R before I found out about ChatGPT (2022), and I did struggle very much. I find R very non-beginner friendly, but once you get the hang of it, it starts getting easier. Anyway, I did my thesis in text-mining and did some Natural Language Processing. I used ChatGPT to generate lines of code for me, and boy did it struggle hahahahaha. I was only able to successfully finish it because my professor of R was very, very strict so we needed to learn it by core. Hence, by knowing how R functioned, I could fit the codes better. But this creates some limitations for people that want to learn R, specifically, with generative AI. There was a multitude of times I recall ChatGPT giving me the non-efficient code, or one that I knew was going to cause me problems later. So I knew then that I had to rewrite those parts.
I feel like as soon as the code gets more complex, i.e., requires more lines of code and combines them to form a chunk, that is when ChatGPT struggles. However, I did realize that you can overcome this by just naming step-by-step what it should do and how it should do it. Then the error rate appears to decrease, in my experience.
At the end, the workload was the same as if I were to have written it by myself with assistance of YouTube or forums.
I definitely can relate with using ChatGPT as an assistent for several tasks. Especially within coding, ChatGPT can prove to be ground-breaking as coding is essentially its ‘native’ language. Therefore, ChatGPT can basically understand any line of code within milliseconds and thus make recommendations or improvements on your code way faster than a senior developer could. However, this mostly seems to be useful for improving already existing code. This is due to the fact that a program often has such detailed specifics that, although ChatGPT can fully understand your code, the prompt needed for creating those lines of codes from scratch need to be very specific to reach a near-perfect accuracy. So if anyone reading this wants to become a software developer, don’t be afraid, we still need you!
I had a similar experience with ChatGPT but during my Pythone code. I personally think, I would have failed without its help as it not only gave me answers to questions I couldn’t ask during classes or find in Google, but also gave me step by step explanation of the codes, which allowed me to understand the logic behind what I was doing. Something that concerns me a bit is the fact, that if GAI can code, maybe it will start coding on itself soon and develop unstoppable and dangerous tools?
Even considering the concerns professionals and academic have about the fast development of GAI, I do see a great potential in it, however, strict policies and trainings need to be developed to control it and embrace it in the best possible way.
I think your input is really interesting about using chatGPT for coding. I think the coding can be really useful for people that already have some knowledge of programming. I think for people that are a complete beginner they should have some basic knowledge of programming before they can use chatGPT because than you can also kind of understand what chatGPT generated.
But I am not skeptical about the usage, I think it is a great tool for coding!