Artificial Intelligence seems to have taken over much of the nation’s creative space in recent years, doing everything from generating artwork to coding whole websites and apps with a single prompt.
And that staggering shift has been scary for some, but Doug Hamilton, president of tech group CharlestonHacks and program architect for MUSC’s Human Centered Design Innovation Lab, said he isn’t too concerned — yet.
CharlestonHacks periodically hosts themed contests for techies for idea generation and computer programming. Known as hackathons, the group invites people to gather to solve difficult tech problems with out-of-the-box thinking. As AI has been a large component of that problem-solving for years now, Hamilton now stresses the importance of using AI responsibly and intentionally, rather than as a shortcut or cheat code, as he related in a recent interview:
City Paper: How did AI change things for you and the hackathon landscape when AI tools started gaining popularity?
Doug Hamilton: It changed a lot. CharlestonHacks, in general, is based on the MIT Reality Hack, which I attended in 2023. That event was on the MIT campus and happened shortly after ChatGPT launched. Folks during this hackathon were already starting to use it to generate code for the projects they were building.
When we did our version with CharlestonHacks, there wasn’t at the beginning as much AI-generated stuff, although it was definitely present. Now, everybody is using it. It has changed a lot, and it has changed the barrier of entry a lot. I’m [also] starting to notice a lot of the fundamentals are becoming a whole lot more relevant again.
CP: It seems like some people are almost looking for ‘AI-free’ as a badge of honor these days. What about you?
DH: I would like to look at that as almost a sort of stigma. Kind of like when everybody was looking for em dashes in emails. There’s certainly a lot of “that looks vibe-coded,” but the fact is, something like 80% to 90% of software developers are using AI-coding tools on a daily basis. So that’s kind of a weird way to look at stuff. There’s lazy AI, but there’s also still really informed, intentional AI use.
CP: What do you think are some of the hallmarks of lazy AI use?
DH: There’s a term, “feature-creep,” developers getting annoyed that there’s more and more features being added to what they’re doing. Because it’s so easy to create new dashboards and crazy graph visualizations, and a lot of times people will attribute complexity to value. You’re not thinking like a software architect. … You don’t have a clear idea of what it is ahead of time, and instead, you’re letting it sort of meander. And what you get is something that doesn’t have a lot of usability in the real world. It just becomes yet another tool that nobody’s going to use.
CP: What does informed, intentional AI use look like?
DH: Fortunately, some of my friends and our board members and people in our community — they show it to me all the time. The fundamentals are there. A good friend of mine created a pretty useful tool for a pretty specific use-case. And he did all the spec-ing of it in the beginning before hitting the equivalent of “run.” He figured out everything it was going to be on his own ahead of time, and used AI to do all the “grunt work.” And what you get is something that out-of-the-box works really well.
CP: Do you think it’s becoming more important or more impressive for people to know how to do these things without the use of AI tools?
DH: It’s kind of like a vine creeping up a ladder, if you want to be ominous about it. Right now, it’s valuable because all the fundamentals are still there. But the vine is creeping up. We went through this phase where we were doing a little witch hunt of looking for em dashes or typefaces with a rainbow fill on it. And now, we might be critical of the obviously vibe-coded stuff, and we’re sort of championing the old-school, hand-coded stuff. But I think with the exception of some really specific, deep AI roles, this sort of witch hunting is becoming more and more obsolete. I don’t think it’s really valuable anymore to go, ‘Wait a minute, that’s AI,’ and feel like it has less merit because of that.
CP: What are some of the limitations of AI in tech space? A lot of the fears people talk about are that this is going to take over and do everything for us. Is that realistic?
DH: For most people, it’s not really that useful right now beyond what the free or pro-tier of ChatGPT is. I think that within the existing infrastructure of a company, it’s really hard for an individual who isn’t tasked with some specific development goal to have any real benefit outside of the conventional ways it’s being used right now — writing emails nicely or creating presentation slides — and I think that’s fine. There isn’t a clear route from a lot of peoples non-software developer roles to obsolescence. I’m not convinced it’s something to be terrified about right now.
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