AI Took My Programming Job!

Up until last year, I was doing a bit of a side hustle helping people program, as in computer programming. It’s something I’ve worked in and studied at university. Anyway, thanks to AI, all my jobs have pretty much dried up.

Here’s Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot. “Write a Python function (Python’s just a programming language) that asks the user for a sentence, and counts the number of characters in that sentence. Type QUIT to exit.” And sure enough, in about three seconds flat, it creates a usable function. Testing it out, yes it really works. “Wow, can you really count this? The number of characters in the sentence is: 31. QUIT. Exiting the program.” Yes, it works perfectly, exactly how I wanted. All I had to know was how to type the description of what I wanted in the AI text box, a basic understanding of programming. It’s very simple, and consequently, many fewer university students need my assistance with programming.

And I’m not even that angry to be fair. Technology is always improving and has always displaced jobs. In the early 1900s, horses were gradually made obsolete as motorised transport became more affordable. All those jobs associated with looking after horses pretty much disappeared. Artisan weavers were reduced to poverty after the introduction of mechanised looms. But I don’t feel bad about it. AI is here now, and there’s nothing I can do to change that fact.

Of course, all the universities are madly updating their policies around AI and cheating. Interestingly, Academic Integrity has the same acronym as Artificial Intelligence. “Contract cheating and impersonation. Submitting assessment that has been produced or modified, wholly or in part, by an artificial intelligence tool where such actions are not authorised in the assessment task.” I deal with lots of students in my day job, and I’m not stupid. Many of them are using AI to at least help them with their assignments. It’s very hard to detect, especially for programming and mathematics. You can get the AI to write the program, and then just modify it to give it your own personal touches.

Many exams now are being done online where obviously students have access to a whole bunch of tools if they want it. The only way to correct this would be to get students back into physical examination rooms with people watching over them while they do their exams. But is there any use? Is it such a big sin to use AI to help you write a computer program? Actually, it makes the process a lot faster, so why wouldn’t you do it?

In the end, businesses are all about cost-saving, so why wouldn’t they want their programmers to use AI to help them speed up the process? Just as people use calculators to help them speed up their maths (there certainly was a time when teachers disallowed the use of calculators because they considered it ‘cheating’), surely the use of AI will be considered the same sort of thing?

Look, AI’s here to stay no matter what people say. Are the universities going to keep calling it “cheating” when it’s actually very useful, or are we going to move on and realise it’s going to become an integral part of our technological future?

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Allégro by Emmit Fenn