Ethical implications of AI-assisted coding in software engineering

Abstract

While the bright light of the age of technology is making our life easier than ever,a new technology is on the rise with even more potential. Artificial Intelligence, shortly AI is increasingly being used in every aspect of our life more so in the creative areas like coding, Software development, software testing and a lot of others. Among the most effective and popular AI-assisted coding tools are ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and DeepSeek. While these tools are unprecedented in suggesting code, fixing bugs and helping the developer brainstorming ideas real-time, concerns is also being raised in different ways. Developers are now changing their roles from writing code by themselves to supervising the code written by the AI. As writing prompts to AI tools is very easy developers are being over reliant on these tools which is harming their overall creative practice and skills. Very little monitoring is being done in these areas and accessing harmful and vulnerable code is very easy using AI tools. Moreover, issues like ownership, plagiarism, bias and safety are also major concerns.

As an answer to the rising concerns this thesis research aims to explore these ethical implications in AI specially in Software Engineering sector. Through a combination of theoretical analysis, case studies and by examining how developers currently are using this tool in real-time, the study aims to imply that the objective is not to prevent the use of AI but to use it responsibly and more ethically.