Coding with AI: Opportunities and Responsibilities for Researchers - Online

A practical introduction to using AI to support coding in research. This course will help researchers understand how to use AI to help them write code effectively and responsibly. This course is designed for researchers with little to no experience coding. The course provides clear, hands-on guidance for using AI to write, debug, and understand code, while addressing key ethical, security, and reliability considerations in research contexts.

The course covers: 

• An overview of the AI landscape

• Practical skills for AI-assisted coding 

• Ethics, reliability and security considerations

Learning Outcomes:

AI Landscape 

• Recall key milestones in the historical development of artificial intelligence
• Describe where ChatGPT and similar large language models fit within the broader AI landscape.
• Explain, at a conceptual level, what generative AI and ChatGPT are.
• Summarize the primary functions and intended use cases of common AI coding assistants.

AI-Assisted Coding

• Explain why delegating full software development to AI without understanding the solution introduces technical, ethical, and reliability risks.
• Describe appropriate roles for AI tools as assistants rather than autonomous developers.
• Use ChatGPT as a reference tool to locate, summarize, and clarify technical information more precisely than traditional search methods.
• Apply AI tools to explain unfamiliar code to support learning.
• Use AI-generated suggestions to debug code and resolve errors.
• Generate boilerplate code using AI assistance.
• Use AI tools to draft technical documentation.
• Analyse when AI assistance enhances productivity versus when it may obscure understanding or introduce errors. 

Ethics, Reliability and Security Considerations 

• Describe common sources of bias, inaccuracy, and unreliability in AI-generated outputs.
• Explain data privacy, confidentiality, and security risks associated with using AI tools in coding and research contexts.
• Summarize intellectual property, authorship, and citation considerations related to AI-generated code and text.
• Analyse the potential long-term consequences of researchers relying on AI tools without developing foundational coding skills.
• Assess the appropriateness of AI tool usage in specific research or coding scenarios.
• Develop personal or team-level guidelines for responsible and ethical AI use in coding and data analysis workflows.

This course is aimed at Researchers with little to no programming experience who are interested in using AI to help them write code for their research. 

Setup Instructions

Please follow the instructions on this web page to download the data and install the required software before attending the workshop: https://southampton-rsg-training.github.io/coding-with-ai/index.html 

Note: If using a University of Southampton machine follow the instructions under the tab labelled ‘University of Southampton Computers’.  If using a personal machine or a machine from another university, please follow the instructions under the tab labelled ‘Personal Computers’.

Programme

• An overview of the AI landscape

• Practical skills for AI-assisted coding 

• Ethics, reliability and security considerations

This course is taking place on 3^rd September 2026 from 13:00 – 16:30.