The year 2023 has been shaped by the release of ChatGPT, and even today, more AI projects are released daily. Everyone who has tried some of them knows they're amazing, and you can generate content super fast and easily with them.
But what if I told you it's bad for you as a new programmer learning how to code?
The fact that you can easily get a working code snippet by just typing a short and simple prompt like "Write me a QR-Code generator in Python" is just mindblowing. Even tho it's mindblowing it brings up some huge concerns about the future of programming.
People start to think "Why should I even consider learning programming if ChatGPT can do it for me?" and that's a problem! They don't know that programming is a lot more than just writing code because it's more about logical understanding and solving problems with the help of code. Coding itself is a very small part of the tasks programmers face.
What actually is ChatGPT?
Since ChatGPT is the most known tool out there right now, let's talk about it a bit more and what it's actually about. I'm not going extremely in-depth but as much as needed to understand my further points.
First of all, what actually is ChatGPT or what's behind it? ChatGPT is, at the time of writing, based on the GPT-3.5 LLM (Large-Language-Model) for free members and on the GPT-4 LLM for paid members. Those so-called LLMs are neural networks that have been trained on a lot of text to understand its content and connections between words and sentences.
Now the first problem with these LLMs mentioned above is that they are outdated! Everything they "know" is from 2021. Since the world is changing faster than ever this is a huge downside when using such AI tools.
Besides that, the information they provide is also not always 100% correct. An AI can only give you as much as it has been trained on itself. Imagination counts also for the big incapabilities of AI like ChatGPT.
Why new programmers shouldn't use AI
I'm sure there are alot of other opinions as well but I don't suggest using ChatGPT and other AI tools when getting into programming.
When thinking about programmers the most of us just think about writing code all day long and that's it. But it's way more that comes with it which is important as well. Other aspects of coding are understand how computers and servers work, learning about cyber security, getting knowledge about infrastructure and different options to host the own applications.
While learning how to code you will definitely get stuck on some errors and other problems. You can just ask ChatGPT and it will may or may not give you a helpful response, which seems great in the first place.
But what happens, when you try to solve it by yourself, read documentations and try to understand what's going on? When trying to solve the issue you come across different sources of knowledge and everywhere you go to read something you learn something new even if it isn't specificily necessary for your problem right now but you will be grateful for it in the future when having a different problem.
You won't get that bonus of "extra knowledge" when just asking ChatGPT. It even gets harder when you have absolutely no clue what your problem is all about so how are you going
to tell ChatGPT about it if you don't know it yourself?
ChatGPT is always only as good as the person who types in the prompt!
Everything that's mentioned above is just a tiny fraction of the whole complexety and ecosystem of AI and its advantages and disadvantages.Other important parts would be copyright of the data the models are trained on or the danger of AI getting as far as being able to think and act by itself.
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