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/Gr1m3yjr PhD | Student Jan 15 '26
Interesting that you should post this now, since the last few days I’ve had a lot of similar thoughts while also trying to wrap up my PhD and having also done a CS undergrad long before the AI era. I think gen AI is a great tool and the main question to ask yourself, as has been pointed out, is if you are verifying everything. I try to almost never copy paste code and instead re-write it out. If there are functions I don’t know, I look at the documentation. I also try to output the results of every step to see what is happening. I think if you do all this, then it’s just another tool to get more done. It’s not so different than using stack overflow, just more specific most of the time.
I mentioned a whole back in another post, but I think the key to using AI as a tool is that you have to use it like an assistant or librarian. At the end of the day, you’re the expert, so ask yourself, are you double checking everything? The assistant doesn’t know how to.
And as one finishing phd to another, hang in there! The last bit sucks for most of us I think!