Tech Talk
How it works, explained in a way that everyone can understand. Your weekly look into what makes your gadgets tick.
Welcome to Tech Talk, a weekly column about the things we use and how they work. We try to keep it simple here so everyone can understand how and why the gadget in your hand does what it does.
Things may become a little technical at times, as that’s the nature of technology — it can be complex and intricate. Together we can break it all down and make it accessible, though!
You might not care how any of this stuff happens, and that’s OK, too. Your tech gadgets are personal and should be fun. You never know though, you might just learn something …
Can an AI chatbot really write software?
As you might have expected, Google I/O is all about AI. Again. We saw a lot of neat demos, including some things that will never see the light of day (I still want Google Assistant to make me a barber shop appointment) as well as plenty of things that are here now or on the way very soon.
Interestingly enough, if you watched the Google I/O Developer Keynote presentation, you heard over and over how Google Gemini‘s new models will be your own powerhouse developer tool, even allowing you to create code out of thin air and a text prompt. Is that even real?
Sort of. The demos you might see of people using AI to write simple software are very real, and AI is completely capable of doing this. AI was trained using many free code examples, so it “knows” the correct syntax and structure of most development languages. These examples also provide context for how to do many simple tasks inside a program.
This means that yes, AI can build an app or even a game. Here’s a good example of someone doing it in a video that you can check out for more information.
As you can see, if you know a little bit about what you’re doing and what you want to achieve, Google Gemini can build a simple text-based game. ChatGPT and the other chatbots out there can do the same; Google doesn’t have a monopoly on the idea.
You can also see that it’s not a very good game. You will find similar walkthroughs of building phone apps with AI, where you end up with a bunch of code to copy and paste into your code editor and let the magic happen. They, too, aren’t very good. This is because of AI limitations.
AI is really good at being a nerd, but it’s terrible at being an artist. What I mean is that AI will follow instructions to the letter, and goofy bugs aside, it will get it right. What it can’t do is think or create anything from scratch.
Even when you use AI to make a picture or video, it’s just pulling the data about what you asked for from its pool of saved data and placing it where you asked it to be placed, doing the things you told it to do. It creates nothing on its own.
That means any app that is created by an AI is going to be… not very good. AI in its current tech can’t replace a human developer and the extra touches one can give to software, like a great interface or a fun game idea. One day it might be able to, but not now.
The good news is that AI is an awesome developer tool, even if it’s not so good at doing all the work. You can use AI to help lay out your app elements, build the code’s skeleton, find syntax errors, and do all sorts of tedious housekeeping duties. It’s really good at it, too!
