Using AI to find solutions

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hi everyone, I want to say I am a beginner to ReactJS because I have completed basic and intermediate ReactJS courses in codecademy and am currently building projects. the problems is that any time I am stuck, I try to find the
solution from Google, and recently, I added AI to it. which makes it easier for me. now, considering my level, is it okay for me to use AI if am stuck? your contributions will be appreciated.
thanks

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I think like most things, it depends on how your using it.

The problem with AI is not the thing itself.
Its that people become dependent on it, when its best to use it as another tool in the toolbox.

The AI you use and the purpose you use it for can also be important.

For me, I use Bing AI in Microsoft Edge browser.
At the beginning, I’d try to type something into the browser search first and if I couldn’t find anything useful after 5-10 mins, would ask the AI.
After a while I found websites I frequented and now will go straight to those first.

I find the AI useful if I’m not really sure what I’m looking for, for example I might just have a curiosity question.

AIs are great for exploring, they will introduce you to things you might not have found otherwise, you can then search and read through documentation and posts to find out more about it.

AI can also be used for learning. The free cs50 Harvard course uses an AI Duck trained to help encourage and explain concepts. But will not just give you the answers.
The idea behind the duck, is that its for learners to use when thinking through problems and considering solutions.

Personally I avoid co-pilot and other things that may auto complete during learning something new.
When your just starting to learn, I believe you should write some boiler plate and functions, and not auto complete everything.
Later you can autocomplete to save time, but at the start its about learning why those things are important and how to use them.

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AI is not the magic place to get answers like everyone believes. It’s actually pretty dumb right now, and gives the wrong answers or information. That why there is a disclaimer when using it for you to check the answer because it can be wrong, and with code its wrong a lot. At your level its better to stay away from it. If you have the knowledge to know whether or not it’s giving you a right or wrong answer is a different thing. If you cant tell if the response is correct, and you just throw the responses into your code then chances are you’re going to cause more damage than good to your code

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Never, ever, ever blindly copy-paste from these platforms.

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Here’s the thing. AI isn’t great if you don’t know what you’re doing. It will lie and give bad answers because it is only a language model. It has no capacity for thinking and as pointed out by Ariel , can and will provide users with malware.

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For someone beginning, I wouldn’t recommend the use of AI, as Cody said the thing is becoming dumb. I’d suggest you dig into documentations and search for other closely or related problems. AI at some point makes one lazy. Just research, try, ask and repeat. You’ll learn more when researching and asking unlike when using LLMs.

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Yes, but its a tool you can use to explore things.
A good search engine tool, not to write code, we can do that ourselves :slight_smile:

For example, something I asked recently to Bing AI:
‘are Python dictionaries similar to PHP arrays using key:value?’

The result gives me a vague explanation of ‘Python dictionaries’ and ‘PHP Associative Arrays’

I might then search ‘Associative Arrays’ to find that many languages use these. Clicking on one of the links will lead me to an article with a better explanation, common use cases and much more.

For me, AI is a search engine to help me jump down rabbit holes, and sometimes a rubber duck to help me think through a problem.

But NEVER for copy/pasting, beginners should not copy/past, even from StackOverflow. :confused:

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It’s a “search engine” that provides inaccurate information in addition to accurate information

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I see ChatGPT or other AI tool as better version of Google.

Earlier majority use to refer to SO code and re-use it or part of it atleast.

But before you copy-paste, you should know why are you doing that and understand fully before blindly copy - pasting.

I heard many companies explicitly asked employees not to use code suggested by ChatGPT

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I see them as profoundly worse versions of Google. Easier to engage with, yes, but with a significantly worse end result.

To use @Guided 's example above, when I put “how do python dictionaries compare to php arrays” into a search engine, my top result was a list of StackOverflow conversations in which you can see not only the thoughtful, expert answers, but also the follow-up conversations about the quality of the answers and updates about how the answer has changed since it was originally asked. The next result was a simple post from a coding blog with examples of how you would write a Python dictionary to most closely match a PHP array. Then there was a more general discussion of how Python dictionaries compare to the common pattern of associative arrays in other languages. With each answer and explanation that you choose to look at, you can see who wrote it, the context in which they wrote it, how long ago it was written, and so on. That will allow you to reconcile potentially conflicting responses. What an LLM chatbot is going to do is basically take in all of the search results and just sort of average them together in a way that makes linguistic sense rather than meaningful correctness, and then it won’t tell you where it got the information from so that you can check whether its credible.

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Please don’t use AI to write forum answers