AI Is Getting Scary

Recently on Facebook, slider puzzle games came up in discussion. I remembered writing a program for playing one of those games and decided to see if I still had one. I did find one. It created a form and let me easily move the "boxes" around. It didn't 1) check to see if everything was in the right place 2) shuffle. So I decided to add those features. Enter GitHub Copilot which is built into Visual Studio.

I started writing an if statement in the appropriate place and Copilot offered the option to call a method called CheckWin. OK I let it finish.

Obviously, I needed CheckWin to be written.  I started writing "private ..." and it offered "bool CheckWin etc." so I let it create the method to see what it came up with. What it wrote works fine although not the same as I would have written it. But ok. CopIlot sure did do a good job of anticipating what I wanted.

My  next step was to add a shuffle method. I started writing "private void Shuffle" and it offered to write the method. That it did pretty much as I would have. So in a few minutes I had everything I needed.

Not sure how I feel about this. How did it figure out what I was up too? Does it have sort of understanding of the words I am using?

Of course, I am working on well-known, established, and simple programming here. There are probably dozens of examples of code on the Internet already that handle these sorts of puzzles. I am not asking AI to do anything new or innovative. Just how useful would AI be if I were working on problems no one has seen before?

None of this is perfect though. Some of the variable names, both that I wrote and that AI wrote, are not particularly informative. I assume I could ask CoPilot to rename things and I may do that. I do believe that the human touch in selecting names may be better than what AI comes up with however.

When if comes right down to it, I will probably not really understand the limits and abilities of AI until I decide to tackle a non-trivial and innovative project. And that is going to take some effort.