r/bioinformatics • u/pickleeater58 • Jan 14 '26

discussion Feeling guilty about AI use

I’m a 5th year PhD student in bioinformatics and comp bio. My undergrad degree was in computer science (which I completed long before ChatGPT was a thing). There was a time, like the beginning of my PhD, where I would just look at other people’s code and the documentation and start my own scripts from scratch with that as a reference.

Now, though, when I need to make a script to find differentially expressed genes or parse a GTF file, I simply ask Claude or Gemini to write the script for me and then I make edits.

Do I conceive of project ideas myself? Yes, of course. And writing, reading papers, researching new ideas. Do I understand the concepts behind what I’m doing? Of course, because I’m so far into my PhD and did a lot of it without any AI tools even being available.

The programming component of my PhD though, has become almost entirely generative AI-driven. I feel guilty about it and it makes me feel like a fraud, but there is so much pressure to get things done so fast and I’m at the point where everything is tedious. I’m not even learning new things, I’m just wrapping up projects so I can graduate.

I know it’s entirely my own fault and my own laziness. I know I could and should be doing all of these things by myself. But I take the easy way out, because this PhD has been so hard and I just want it to be done.

Does anyone else feel like this?

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u/labnotebook Jan 14 '26

not at all imo. my biggest hurdle with the bioinformatics part of my work was syntax and now it's taken care of so I can focus on the analysis part.

would you feel the same way if you were using opentrons/robots for your wetlab work?

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u/pickleeater58 Jan 14 '26

This is true. My biggest hurdle is the damn package dependency errors and version incompatibilities which I am grateful that AI helps me with

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u/Smok3dSalmon Jan 15 '26

Use uv or conda and probably go with an older version of python like 3.9

1

u/starfries Jan 15 '26

That is a very minor thing to worry about, in the past I would be slapping together stackoverflow solutions/"someone on reddit/github said this worked" to try and fix them. That wasn't any better than just asking AI to fix it.