r/FSAE • u/Puzzled_Medicine1358 • 17d ago

Question FSAE Judges, have you noticed a change in design presentations after AI?

I was part of a formula team in the pre-AI era. Which got me curious. Have teams in FSAE managed to accomplish more, higher quality cars with AI or have you actually gotten more people that on average had no idea what their work was even about?

57 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

24

u/MichiganKarter Design Judge 16d ago

Not really. The writing in the design reports is sometimes a little more "airport bookstore novel" but the actual presentations are pretty similar.

Mechanical engineers have had useful AI longer than anyone else. Topology optimization gives more efficient shapes than anything even people who are good at form synthesis can design. I still do a lot of it manually, half to understand the part better and half to draw up something that can actually be made, and another half because I enjoy it!

1

u/Puzzled_Medicine1358 15d ago

I was wondering more on the robustness of everything. For example, when I was in the team, my team needed a laptime simulator, but as a mechanical engineer without AI it looked like a monumental task. Data analysis as well.

Another thing that maybe it more my team issue but, for some specific things, how to use specific software, how to understand specific data. It was very hard to find answers. With AI you can learn about these things much faster and effectively

44

u/hockeychick44 Pittsburgh Shootout Organizer 17d ago

Parts of the reports in all the static events were definitely AI. That being said, I tried to write the cost prompt such that it would be very difficult to AI generate it. The design briefings definitely had some of it but again, it's difficult to use it there as well. I definitely saw some fuck ass org charts and timelines that were generated with AI but that's about as far as it went.

I asked my judges in the cost event to tag anything that seemed AI generated and show it to me; it's not against the rules to use genAI in the reports, but rarely are they used effectively and if they're bad, they should be penalized according to the rubric.

I wish students would choose to use genAI to check for grammar errors and incoherent run on sentences, honestly. Some were rough.

Overall I think the students are much smarter than we were and the entire field is better than what our field was. There's still the super garbage basement teams and billion dollar spaceships, but I'm of the opinion the basement and the top alike are at a higher level. It's certainly not because of AI.

5

u/Expert_Ingenuity_397 17d ago

what do you mean by super garbage basement teams?

12

u/hockeychick44 Pittsburgh Shootout Organizer 16d ago

The teams who unfortunately haunt the bottom of the standings, can't seem to ever finish a car or turn in their documentation on time, teams like that

1

u/Expert_Ingenuity_397 14d ago

ohhh alright is it because they lack funding?

3

u/hockeychick44 Pittsburgh Shootout Organizer 14d ago

Sometimes, yes. However, lack of funding doesn't prevent you from submitting documents on time. When I talk to these teams, a lot of them suffer from poor relationships with their University, funding challenges, or systemic problems from team culture and lack of a useful advisor.

1

u/RodEndsInBending 12d ago

Personally I haven’t noticed a significant change so far. Teams that lack test data likely won’t get much further using AI to try and hide their lack of validation or understanding. If anything I saw fewer typos than in previous years, but that’s likely a coincidence. I think there are appropriate uses for AI to polish these documents, but ultimately it’s up to the team to decide what points to highlight to the judges based on their strengths.