Hi everyone. I’m a senior Computer Engineering student and my girlfriend is a senior Mechanical Engineering student.
She is caring, cute, clever and really thoughtful. I love everything about her. But the one thing that always bugs me out is the amount of AI she uses.
When we met 2 years ago the first topic we talked about was about AI and ever since that day I always mentioned her the advancements and dangers of AI. I said how there can’t be ethical AI and any use of it is harmful.
She agrees with me every time and says she will decrease her usage but at the end she uses it still. Projects, reports, homeworks all go through the LLM. She shows me her work and I can’t congratulate her without forcing myself because I know it’s AI.
She has diagnosed ADHD and I think this might be one of the reasons but I still don’t understand. She sometimes spends hours working. If she had spent that time with pen and paper she could’ve reached the same conclusions she did with AI but with more understanding of her work.
I don’t want to upset her but also seeing someone this close to me do this is saddening to me. What should I do? Should I just ignore it?
Perhaps address the impact this will have in the future in her career. From decades of experience in the mechanical field, I will tell you that if she doesn’t have the knowledge in her head she will get laughed at and fired. AI has not really penetrated the mechanical field. Yes, there is AI in CAD and other software, but at best it is for tinkerers and not scalable. Without the knowledge she won’t last a month in a mech eng role, assuming she manages to even get one.
She recently used AI in Solidworks to generate a ladder and said everyone at the internship is doing the same and telling her its the future.
Do you think that’s the case? Atleast for CAD in particular.
She may be considered for an entry level mech eng role, but based on her workflow her knowledge of fundamentals of mechanical design would be questioned. Generating models is very minor. She needs to understand basics of construction, manufacturing, material selection, design limitations and most critically overlooked, tolerances. She won’t become a senior engineer without being a junior engineer and the learning curve is steep. The CAD portion is general grunt work, which to be clear is what she is offloading here. That grunt work is where a mech eng refines their knowledge of the previously mentioned topics and learns how to apply them to mechanical design for manufacturing, assembly and user experience, skills which a good mech eng is trying to develop. This isn’t even touching on designing for strict constraints like regulatory standards. Engineering is a delicate balance of a million different compromises, and she must understand the compromises she is making with her designs. If it was about just chugging out models she would be screwed along with every other junior mech eng, and would be replaced by AI. This won’t happen because AI is not trustworthy, lies and hallucinates. The design review method is done by a person with whom you can have meaningful dialogue with. AI erodes critical thinking, which is what she needs to learn, but isn’t while using AI.