The use of generative AI by students has increased significantly in recent years, but the question is: how useful are these tools in practice? I have mixed feelings: sometimes brilliant, but sometimes frustrating. During my thesis research, I used ChatGPT for coding. The tool seemed to understand how to code and provided me with long code. I quickly realized this wasn’t efficient; the code was often unnecessarily long, increasing the risk of errors and making it difficult to understand. My next step was watching YouTube coding tutorials. The combination of these tutorials and using ChatGPT proved effective. The generative AI provided direction and ideas, while the tutorials helped with practical implementation. The question is whether generative AI will ever be able to code without human correction.
For my thesis research, I also used the DALL·E program. I’m not a creative person myself, but using this tool suddenly gave me a graphic designer at my disposal. I created my cover page and a few other images with it in fifteen minutes.
The NotebookLM program also proved very useful. When writing a thesis, you’re constantly looking for sources that support your research or show the downsides. These articles are often long and complex. Generative AI can be very useful here; you send the article as a PDF, and the program starts writing a concise summary, which is very useful. At the same time, I wondered: will I miss the nuance and details if I rely too much on these summaries? In practice, it sometimes turned out that important details were missing.
In my opinion, generative AI should be seen as a sparring partner rather than a replacement. What do you think: should we view AI primarily as a tool, or should we accept that it will eventually take over some of our thinking?
I totally get what you mean. AI can be both amazing and a bit frustrating. Like you said, when I tried using ChatGPT for coding, the code it produced was often way too long and prone to errors, so I had to spend time figuring it out. But when I combined it with tutorials and my own knowledge, it worked really well—AI gives you direction and ideas, and you handle the practical part.
Overall, AI is more as a helpful tool than a replacement.It can speed things up and give you ideas, but you still need to do the thinking.
At least for now, I believe that we should use artificial intelligence as a tool. However, this may change as technology continues to advance.
In my experience, using artificial intelligence can actually take more time for certain tasks. For example, in a project at my home university I used artificial intelligence to create marketing texts for a presentation for a start-up we had developed. I noticed that I had to keep adjusting and refining the prompts so that the results met my requirements. In the end, this process took so much time that I could certainly have written the texts more quickly myself.
Therefore, I can absolutely agree with the previous comment. When used in combination with your own knowledge, artificial intelligence can be extremely helpful and significantly speed up your work, as well as save time. However, you should not rely entirely on the results of artificial intelligence.