Programming students have a widespread access to powerful Generative AI tools like ChatGPT. While this can help understand the learning material and assist with exercises, educators are voicing more and more concerns about an over-reliance on generated outputs and lack of critical thinking skills. It is thus important to understand how students actually use generative AI and what impact this could have on their learning behavior. To this end, we conducted a study including an exploratory experiment with 37 programming students, giving them monitored access to ChatGPT while solving a code understanding and improving exercise. While only 23 of the students actually opted to use the chatbot, the majority of those eventually prompted it to simply generate a full solution. We observed two prevalent usage strategies: to seek knowledge about general concepts and to directly generate solutions. Instead of using the bot to comprehend the code and their own mistakes, students often got trapped in a vicious cycle of submitting wrong generated code and then asking the bot for a fix. Those who self-reported using generative AI regularly were more likely to prompt the bot to generate a solution. Our findings indicate that concerns about potential decrease in programmers' agency and productivity with Generative AI are justified. We discuss how researchers and educators can respond to the potential risk of students uncritically over-relying on generative AI. We also discuss potential modifications to our study design for large-scale replications.

本研究探讨编程学生如何利用生成式人工智能工具及其对学习行为的影响。研究发现，尽管部分学生借助AI完成编程练习，但他们往往仅仅是请求生成完整的解决方案，而缺乏对代码的深入理解与自我修正的能力。研究结果揭示了对编程学生自主性和生产力下降的真实担忧，提示教育者需关注这种对生成式AI的过度依赖。

编程学生如何使用生成式人工智能？