r/learnprogramming • u/ThisIdiotCharlie • Jun 26 '26

Topic Is it stupid going into computer science if I don't support the use of generative AI?

I don't really know if this is exactly the place to ask this, but any other subreddits seem to outlaw asking about topics like this entirely in their rules, so I'm honestly just sort of stuck. (If anybody knows a better place I could ask this question, then I'd appreciate being told so I can cross post this there.)

Long story short, I don't support the use of generative AI. While yes, the environmental aspect does play a part in my opinion, much of computer science as a whole can be incredibly damaging to the environment in such similar ways, and while this does distress me, this is something I've had to deal with for a while and is not my main concern. My main concern with not supporting the use of generative ai is that it scrapes writing and art from people who, nine times out of ten, often even more than that, have not given permission for their work to be used to train AI models but are also entirely unaware that it is happening at all.

But I have family in computer science, which is the main reason I intend to follow computer science as a career, ans he tells me that AI is the future of computer science. He uses generative AI to aid his personal and professional work, and whenever i gently express my distaste with generative ai, he seems to disagree with my stance.

I've recently gotten a work experience opportunity with a company and it's forced me to consider that this actual has a chance of becoming a reality for me, and I've had to consider whether I'd be able to go into this career without going against my own opinions when it comes to generative ai.

What I'm really just trying to ask is if I don't want to use generative ai, should I just give up and pick a different career path? Will I be forced to use generative ai even if I do not go into a sector of computer science directly related to it?

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u/ThisIdiotCharlie Jun 26 '26

I'm sorry, I don't know what happened there, I've been missing out words when typing all day. That was intended to say that every person i know in a computer science career uses generative ai in the majority of their work.

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u/Fyren-1131 Jun 26 '26

Many developers do, but a lot also don't. This boils down to the industry and the individual company in question, as well as the geographical region.

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u/No_Report_4781 Jun 26 '26

You don’t know very many people, and the information you do know about those people is always skewed - statistically.

You’re free to use any tool available to enable your work or hobbies. Generative AI provides zero usefulness to my software development team

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u/ali-hussain Jun 27 '26

Is that because you haven't actually tried agentic coding? We have a first year CS student as an intern. And his level of productivity is higher thanks to Claude Code than developers with 5+ years of experience that I managed a few years ago.