My issue with every chatbot I've tried

I TA for an electrical engineering class. It's amusing, to look at student's code these days. Everything is so needlessly wrapped up in 3-line functions, students keep trying to do in 25 lines what can be done in 2, and it all becomes impossible to debug.

When their code inevitably breaks, they ask me to tell them why it isn't working. My response is to ask them what its meant to be doing, but they can't answer, because they don't know.

The sad thing is we try to make it easy on them. Their assignment specs are filled with tips, tricks, hints, warnings, and even pseudo-code for the more confusing algorithms. But these days, students would rather prompt chatgpt than read docs.

I've never seen chatgpt ever benefit a student. Either it misunderstands and just confuses the student with nonsense code and functions, or else in rare cases it does its job too well and the students don't end up learning anything. The department has collectively decided to ban it and all other genAI chatbots starting next semester.

A friend of mine works in a similar position and we discussed it a bit.

Since ai is a thing and we have some newer, younger and motivated profs, they actually kind of teach and discuss the use of ai in class, which is pretty important.

In my opinion we will not get rid of them, just like the internet.

And we have no metric to determined if ai was used or not.

So the only way to deal with this situation is to accept the existence and use of ai and create different tasks.

For example make them explain the code and make it clear there will be questions. That way they have to learn code. If they use ai or not does not matter.

And create tasks that require human interaction, like collaborative tasks, those can't be done by ai and you have to structure the project.
This is my big concern at my day job. Management keeps pushing AI chat on my younger co-workers, but they can't tell when it's hallucinating. And since there's no feedback loop (our chatbot doesn't learn from us as we type), it just keeps spewing the same lies.
- Yeah, been dealing with that a bunch lately too, I've started pushing them towards the documentation directly (though to be fair, sometimes that's ass or nearly nonexistent) with some success.
I don't understand why it would be acceptable to submit generated code in the first place. I'd say it's functionally asking others to complete your assignment. Sampling code excessively and without attribution is plagiarism.

And seconding that concern about people not even learning how code works. This was an issue even before chatGPT, when people would by-default look up stack overflow snippets or existing algorithms instead of thinking and training their mind to be able to solve actual real problems, but now it's probably much more widespread as an easier way out. If the school is able to do a code exam in an offline environment, even with manual docs available, it should weed out the ones who didn't learn pretty quickly.
There is no need to ask GPT for a ready-to-use code, it does not work well for it. But it explains someone else's complex code much better. Students need to ask it for short hints in places where it is not clear specifically or very small parts of the code, then it brings good benefits.
How do you know if it doesnt benefit a student? If their work is exceptional, do you assume they didnt use an LLM? Or do you not see any good code anymore?
- It replaces the work required to research and think about the problem. You know the part where you'd normally learn and understand the issue at hand
- I mean, they don't generally keep their use of chatgpt a secret. Not for now, anyway. Meanwhile, the people who do well in the class write their code in a way that clearly shows they read the documentation, and have made use of the headers we've written for them to use.
  
  In the end, does it matter? This isn't a CS major, where you can just BS your way through all your classes and get a well paying career doing nothing but writing endpoints for some js framework. We're trying to prepare them for when they're writing their own architecture, their own compilers, their own OSses; things that have 0 docs for chatgpt to chew up at spit out, because they literally don't exist yet.

I keep seeing ads for those AI tools that re-write work emails for you, to give them a "better tone". Does the world really need an automated tool to help people with workplace posturing?

I find this even funnier knowing there are AI products out there to summarize incoming emails so you don't have to read the whole thing. We live in a world with software to write emails nobody cares enough to write themselves, to be summarized by other software for people who don't care enough to read them.

There was an episode about this on abbot elementary xd

The Google AI recently told a user to die while it was helping them with their homework. This is the plot of The Matrix.

Saw that, yah. Pretty dark time line, eh? Reminds me of Black Mirror on Netflix too.

I used chatgpt as a code monkey for a while. Let it do the repetitive work. But then I got good at using multiline editor features.

Now I use it to "give this form some basic css" or "open a udp connection in c#". Anything more complex or nuanced than that I find I can do better and faster.

I ask it for help when I'm unfamiliar with a library/language or if I'm getting complex errors.

But I always type out the code myself, making sure I'm reading each line and understanding what's happening.

Even for boilerplate if you just let the ai go at it, it'll generate a Frankenstein boilerplate of an outdated standard.

It was very helpful in helping with Python code as well as SQL. Then I needed something in Power Bi. Answer was just no thelpful. It was just lacking. So I went on a google search instead. Didn't take long for me to find the exact <or nearly identical> answer chatgpt gave.

Then I needed something in Power Bi.

I am so sorry. I hope you are ok.
- I've shifted to Excel. Thanks for asking.
- also yes
Then I needed something in Power Bi.

A reason to not harm yourself?
Sqlbi for Power BI, Marco and Alberto have pretty much been my go to in that world for probably near a decade (though I haven't really done a lot of that in a long while).
- Might look into that. Thanks.

Me with Microcenter employees.

Haha, I'm sure they know a lot of people coming into the store know more than them, but then again, I bet they get a LOT of dumb questions, all day long.

Why yes, we do sell the purple RAM. And yes, you're right - it is faster like that podcaster told you. It's right over here...
- They get paid on commission which is why they always put their stickers on anything you buy so the store knows who sold it to you.