GitHub Copilot, CompSci programlama alıştırmalarında hile yapmak için mükemmel olabilir

Microsoft'un AI kod önerme aracı GitHub Copilot, eğitimcilerin bilgisayar bilimlerini nasıl öğrettiklerini yeniden düşünmeleri gerekebilecek kadar yetenekli olduğunu gösteriyor.

Massachusetts Üniversitesi Amherst bilgisayar bilimi profesörü Emery Berger bu ayın başlarında bir blog yazısı warning educators that "students armed with [Copilot] will be bringing Uzis to a knife fight."

Onun endişesi şu Yardımcı pilot Copilot tüm cevapları bildiği için geleneksel programlama alıştırmalarını (bilgisayar bilimi eğitiminin bir parçası ama hiçbir şekilde hepsini değil) anlamsız hale getirecektir.

"As far as I can tell, Copilot was specifically trained on all the intro programming assignments ever," Berger wrote. "Copilot frickin’ loves intro programming assignments."

Anlayabildiğim kadarıyla, Copilot, şimdiye kadarki tüm giriş programlama görevlerinde özel olarak eğitildi.

For students using Copilot, he wrote, educators might as well describe their course objectives as "hitting the Tab key," in reference to the key command to generate code from a description of the desired output.

"Programming plays a role in a lot of computer science classes, and especially in introductory computer science classes," explained Berger in a phone interview with Kayıt. Bu genellikle, bir sayı listesini belirli bir şekilde sıralamak veya bir Fibonacci dizisinin n'inci öğesini bulmak vb. için alıştırmaları içerir.

"Copilot will just do them," said Berger. "It's not just that it does them and it does them well. It's also that it does them using the tools that you would want and expect your students to actually be using to write their code. If they start writing code and Copilot is installed, it will fill out the solution."

Berger, Yardımcı Pilotun Stack Overflow ve diğer internet programlama kaynaklarında yanıt aramaktan farklı olduğunu söyledi.

"You can already find examples of code online," he said. "But you know, the instructor can also Google for them and then compare that code against the code submitted with a plagiarism detector."

Copilot is different, he said, "It actually generates novel solutions. Not like they're super-crazy, sophisticated, genius solutions. But it makes new solutions that are superficially different enough that they plausibly could have come from a student."

It actually generates novel solutions ... that are superficially different enough that they plausibly could have come from a student

As a result, Berger argues, pedagogy related to programming needs to adapt. One approach, which he ridicules in his post, is "to plug our ears with our fingers and kind of shout while pretending [Copilot] doesn't exist, which is more or less the same thing as pretending plagiarism doesn't exist, and pretending that the internet doesn't exist."

"But if you care about the integrity of the process … this is just a cheating machine," he said. "Like somebody gives you a spec for an assignment, you just type in this back in comments and hit Tab, right?"

"So I don't think that it's reasonable or responsible to think that everybody is going to refrain from using this amazing cheating machine that's installed on their laptops … I think that the temptation is too great. And honestly, it's what software development is probably going to look like, very, very soon."

Berger, Yardımcı Pilotun yararlı olduğunu kabul ediyor ve geliştiricilerin yazılımı kullanmak isteyeceklerinin mantıklı olduğunu söylüyor.

"We just need to really rethink things altogether," said Berger. "Certainly from the evaluation standpoint, we can obviously just require people to do things in environments where they can't use Copilot. Just like elementary school kids don't get to use calculators when doing basic arithmetic. So we can have paper and pencil exams."

Illinois'de programlama testleri için kilitlenmiş bilgisayarları kullanmayı tanımlayan bir meslektaşı olduğunu söyledi, böylece öğrenciler sınavlarına kontrollü bir ortamda giriyorlar. Bu tür önlemler ve sözlü sınavlar gibi şeyler, önerdiği gibi, Yardımcı Pilotun kullanılabilirliğinin bazı olumsuz yönlerinin ele alınmasına yardımcı olabilir.

Berger ayrıca Copilot'un standart doldurma ve API'leri uygulama gibi olumlu yönleri olduğunu da gözlemledi.

"I don't think that memorizing the minutia of countless APIs is really interesting intellectually," he said. 'It's not the kind of thing we should really be teaching or focusing on. Do you know the exact syntax to create a DataFrame with these characteristics? I don't care. If you have to look it up on Google or on Stack Overflow, or you just hit Tab and it just does it for you, that sounds fine to me."

Nonetheless, he argues it's important for educators to make sure students are actually learning the material, which may mean rethinking how much homework assignments that can be solved with Copilot should count when calculating an overall grade.

Berger said it's probably premature to say that Copilot has had an effect on students, because the software has only been publicly available for a few months. But he argues it won't be long before its impact starts to show.

"I would like to be optimistic about this," said Berger. "But I think at minimum, we just need to be thoughtful of it. I just don't think that there are many educators out there who are aware of how much of a revolution this is." ®