On Building an AI App
You have likely read my previous thoughts on AI and followed my frustrations with my students who continually use AI to complete their college assignments. At the same time, if you are my friend on Facebook, you have seen a few recent updates chronicling my development of a power soccer app. This program will allow users to diagram and animate various power soccer plays for distribution to their teams. Many such programs exist for other sports, but I only found one quite expensive application in the UK specifically designed for power soccer.
The problem? I am not a programmer. I am just a guy looking for a product he couldn’t find. So I made it…… entirely with AI, Grok specifically. By using AI, I was able to create something in a few hours that would likely have taken me weeks or months of dedicated study to learn how to make. Admittedly, it is not the most complicated program ever, but it is clear that using AI was much easier for me.
I think my experience illustrates the central conflict many people feel with AI. It replaces the educational process. I did not have to learn how to program, yet I was able to make a program. My students do not need to learn how to write essays, yet they still submit them.
On one hand, you could argue that this is a good thing. For example, my power soccer app never would have existed without AI. I wasn’t going to pay a programmer hundreds or thousands of dollars to do this for me, to create something fun for my own personal use (though others might benefit as well). I have other ways to spend my money. However, I think it is good that this app exists, and I think people will enjoy it, so, in a way, it is truly available through the existence of AI, which is good.
On the other hand, you could argue this is actually a bad thing. I would be a more intelligent person if I knew how to program. I would have knowledge that I don’t have right now, and learning is a good thing. It is good to have skills in a variety of fields, so even though I would have needed to invest time, AI allowed me to entirely avoid the education, which means I never learned, and therefore I am worse off than I otherwise would have been.
There are some critical differences between my project and a college essay. I am not passing off this application as my own work; I have already admitted it is 100% AI, written through my prompts, but I did not write any code. That is different than my students suggesting that AI work is their own. Also, I am not enrolled in a program specifically designed to certify, by presenting a degree at the end, that I am a trained programmer. By graduating with a college degree, my students receive a credential indicating they passed all their classes and, in theory, learned all the material necessary to satisfy the degree requirements. Using something to short-circuit the educational process delegitimizes the degree.
I still don’t claim to have all of the answers about AI usage. It is a complicated topic. This process has raised even more questions in my head. I mentioned that if I wanted to do this before, I would have needed to hire a programmer. If everybody does this, how many freelance programmers will be out of business? Do entry-level programmers even have a chance in the job market anymore? It seems, at least from the results I have gotten so far, that an AI can build a relatively basic program on its own. A qualified programmer with advanced skills would probably build off of that foundation to make it even better, but that eliminates the entry-level guy. There will be economic consequences to AI usage.
I can’t really decide if it matters that I didn’t learn how to program. As I have said above, I’m not claiming to be a programmer and would never advertise myself as such. I don’t really have a desire to learn to program, but I do like building cool things like this. It seems like AI lets me enjoy this in a lightweight way without having to invest time. However, is it good to be able to produce things without a significant investment? This is essentially the argument of the industrial age, brought forward into the digital age. Was mass production good? Economists and sociologists continue to argue this question. We got a lot of consumer products, and we destroyed craftsmanship. Was it worth the trade-off?
My thoughts about AI are continually developing, but I would love to hear your thoughts as well. Feel free to email me, but please do not use AI to do so. I want your thoughts.