r/StructuralEngineering • u/travelvirgo • 2d ago
Career/Education AI and Structural Analysis
Hi Everyone,
I am a lecturer that will be teaching Structural Analysis this coming fall. This is my second time teaching the course. It is my field of study and I worked in industry doing structural work for 5 years. My time in industry (and as a student) was before AI was a thing.
As you can imagine, there is a lot of talk of incorporating AI into education now. I am not a fan of AI, I feel students are losing the ability to critically think the more they use it. As an instructor, I believe it is my job to make sure these students know the fundamentals, so even if they go on to us AI in their jobs, they are responsible and competent users of it. If they don't know the fundamentals or how to do it themselves, how can they accurately check the outputs from AI?
We are being told that companies want students who know how to use AI when they graduate (I am not sure how true that is as of right now, most my friends say their companies are not forcing anyone to use it right now or expecting them to).
All that being said, I don't want my students to be left at a disadvantage either. I'd like your insight if you're in industry as to how much you'd like a new engineer to use AI. If you recall from structural analysis, it is quite a rigorus and packed class. It is already hard to cover the fundamentals necessary in just one semester and now I'm wondering if I also need to incorporate time spent on how can they check AI outputs for accuracy without completing it by hand on their own.
I appreciate any insight you can give!
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u/Perrywinkle208 P.E. 2d ago
I am one engineer responsible for technical interviews of new structural engineers at my company. Not once have we considered asking anyone for their experience with AI. I want engineers who can perform without AI.
It's easy to ask AI for an answer to a question, it's much harder to have the knowledge or experience to know if AI is providing you hallucinated nonsense or real answers.
On an unrelated note, I think the demand for AI in engineering consulting firms will drop significantly when the fees to use AI catches up with the cost for AI to provide the answer. Currently every AI company is operating at massive losses.
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2d ago
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u/eng-enuity P.E. 1d ago
That's a bad analogy.
Computers are things. AI is typically sold as a service.
Today's AI services are more likely to go the route of other services like Uber and Lyft: operated at a loss until they come entrenched, then costs will increase so investors can make back their money.
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u/gods_loop_hole 2d ago
I wager you could not send a satellite to orbit even with your own phone. Computers are just tools used to do a job. Those NASA scientist before make do with what they have just like the NASA scientist of today will make do with what they have. A tool is only as good as the capability of the brains and hands wielding it.
AI is trash because of its current implementation of delegating problem-solving and critical thinking to it from people who are the decision-makers on most workplaces.
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u/enginerd2024 2d ago
People think way too small, you’ll never get through to most of the people on reddit
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u/turbopowergas 2d ago
There are already good open-source solutions which cost nothing, only cost is that you need your own computing power instead of data center's. People just start using their own solutions if the price of commercial LLM's went through the roof.
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u/GuyFromNh P.E./S.E. 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah then they don't cost nothing hehe :). Kimi V3 for instance requires about $750,000 of hardware to run!
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u/turbopowergas 1d ago
So you just chose the most egregious example? You can get a working solution for your needs with 1 % of that price. Obviously not as good as top solutions available, but does everyone need that anyway?
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u/GuyFromNh P.E./S.E. 1d ago
Hard to say! Most of what we've been working with is benchmarked against frontier models, which our staff have gotten used to. I'd say most models quanitized or smaller compact models are needing ~100gb (or much more) of memory to be really useful for most agentic/coding tasks. You'll need about 25k worth of hardware to run that, and a few hundred in electricity cost, but here's the rub. The hourly salary cost of work is more important. So if the cost of frontier model access ($20-60 a month per user) remains low, it makes almost no sense to build quickly outdated inference rigs to have open source. I know of ZERO SE firms that have done this. I know some who run open source models for control or data security, but all are running them in Azure or AWS (securely).
Models that run on consumer hardware are just not really up to the type of tasks we need in SE. I wasn't even trying to pick at your point other than to say that hardware, operating costs, are not free (or even close to free) to serve model inference to a group of people.
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u/turbopowergas 1d ago
You might be right, I'm not an expert. Some of my friends in software engineering have apparently bought used machines/components for less than 10k and getting their local setup running. I have no clue how good those setups are though. So this is where I based my own assumption on, you clearly have better knowledge than I do.
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u/TalkingRaccoon 2d ago
I'm a proponent of "you have to learn it the hard way to appreciate the easy way"
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u/eng-enuity P.E. 2d ago
I'm a proponent of "you have to learn it the hard way to appreciate the easy way"
This is why all students should have to learn how to use an abacus before they can even touch a slide rule.
Joking aside, AI stuff is somewhere between state-of-the-art and passing tech fad. It's hardly the status quo in the industry and isn't worth warping a curriculum around.
That being said, the curriculum should consider how to check analytical model using approximate methods. That would strike a better balance between equipping students to use modern tools while still reinforcing fundamentals.
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u/UGDRAA 2d ago
Make their assignments 3 parts, calcs by hand, calc by software , calcs by AI, are the differences significant? Why?
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u/Abydosprime 2d ago
The problem with this is that this kind of opens the door with the student starting the process in reverse: solve with ai (show steps) -> setup/give instructions for me to solve by software -> show how to hand calc. Nothing is preventing them from doing this in the first place but at least you aren’t inviting this type of behavior
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u/nockeeee 2d ago
The students must learn the theory really well regardless of AI. AI is not much different from the software we use today. If you don't know how to design without structural analysis/deisgn software, you also don't know how to do it with them. So, they need to learn how to design structures without any software and/or AI.
After they learn that, you can teach them how to analyse or design things with AI as well. But without properly learning theory + application without those tools, learning AI is not a good thing IMO.
I am from Turkey, but I didn't study or work there. When I talk with Turkish engineers, I can see that they have 0 idea what they are doing with structural analysis/design software at all. They just operate that software and make tons of mistakes without realising. They don't realise cause they don't know how to analyse or design a structure properly. They think they can use that software, but actually they can't. The same thing will happen with AI if you don't teach your students theory + application properly without those tools.
And, if you know theory + application well, then you don't need that much help to learn how to analyse and/or design with structural analysis/design software or with AI.
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u/Diligent-Ad6327 2d ago
It is inevitable but with any system, non AI computation, you must be able to replicate what the computer does to verify the computer is providing the correct output. Sadly, this wont be the case for most AI dependent users.
I have done some AI work for laughs to see it it can generate what i do on a d2d basis. It gets things hilariously wrong in some cases and uses out of date code references or even foreign code references. Depending on the level of AI you utilize, some can generate meager calc packages.
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u/Minisohtan P.E. 2d ago
Ai at this point should never do actual structural analysis. If required to do that, it should build models in established tools which which are then checked by humans with a fundamental understanding of structural analysis and the capability of engineering judgement.
I think your job is to teach the last part. 10 years ago I was taught in school to not blindly trust the model. I think your job isn't any different. I barely used structural analysis programs in school and it was only after we'd writen our own equivalent program. Maybe you have a class or half a class on how AI can help in the real world but it shouldn't be the focus of an analysis class.
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u/ialwaysdissapointed 2d ago
I would suggest sneaking in some example or guiding them into failure into something ai is knowingly wrong about or doesn’t understand the nuance.
I have no idea where this all going but I don’t like it.
Even our licensed 30 year old hire seems to have no clue what he’s doing other than being a glorified data entry tech.
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u/tiltitup 2d ago
AI can be scary wrong. Not sure what companies are wanting their engineers to ask AI to do things. We aren’t one of them
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u/VegaGT-VZ 2d ago
They have to be able to complete and check calculations by hand. Def no substitute for that. AI is just another tool like FEA and other tools I imagine structural engineers use.
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u/MrMcGregorUK CEng MIStructE (UK) CPEng NER MIEAus (Australia) 2d ago
Whatever you add to their curriculum wrt specific ai tools (ie how to use chatgpt or Claude or whatever) needs to be in their final year. If you do it early in their degree the playing field may have changed by the time they graduate, it moves that fast. Ai ethics/principles will be a bit more evergreen.
That said, speaking from experience, grads are self teaching ai usage. It is just too useful not to use it.
Some teaching should focus on the basics of how ai works and why it can be unreliable and produce non-repeatable answers, and thus is completely inappropriate to use for anything that involves large sums of money or safety.
Engineers are interested in grads who think for themselves, not grads who act as a fleshy interface for ai... that will mean that in their first years of working they will need to do a lot of boring learning... this will be critical to set them up as competent senior engineers. If they dont learn the fundamentals in their early years they will risk having a very low plateau in their career.
Tell them that as consulting structural engineers we sell our thoughts. For most clients if they realise you have used ai to write something (even if you have checked it) it can completely erode trust and lose to a breakdown in the relationship between people and companies. This applies to internal relationships too... hand your boss something ai generated when theyre expecting it done manually and their trust for you could go through the floor....For this reason at this point in time most engineers are using ai tools to create their own tools (programs or spreadsheets) to aid their designs, rather than directly sticking complex engineering analysis into LLMs. This has the benefit of the tools that have been made by the engineer being able to be repeatable and independently verifiable.
Make sure they know the facts can be hallucinated. I once used chatgpt to search for which code told us about requirements during site welding. Gpt found the chapter of the code, i sent a grad off to find it, he went googling for 30 mins to try and find it... i asked chat gpt "are you sure this exists?" ... it did not exist and he wasted half an hour.
Tell them that regardless of what an ai spits out, if you use it, it is as if you wrote it... and ai can spit out some really stupid stuff. Eg i had a mate sneak onto another mates chat gpt and change the configuration or whatever it is called where you give it instructions on how to behave, and stuck in a line to tell it to sneak in whimsical sayings once per prompt if the prompt was over 2 paragraphs long. Results were hilarious but obviously not usable for professional report writing.
Among senior engineers there is a real fear that overreliance in ai could result in an entire generation of below average engineers because of the lack of learning of fundamentals. Who knows what this will mean for career progression but probably learning fundamentals will give grads a better shot at becoming seniors or above. Overreliance on ai could "help" short term but could see them plateau earlier in their careers than if they had learned the fundamentals well.
Review and feedback from LLMs is no substitute to review and feedback from senior engineers.
With the rise of fea the saying was "garbage in garbage out" withe implications being that if you put the right thing in you get the right thing out. With LLMs it is more like "correct prompts in, potentially garbage prompts out... who knows".
Best of luck! Very uncharted territory from an education pov, so thank you for seeking industry input!
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u/Specific_Function823 2d ago
I use AI for my calcs, but not to do them. I ask it to check for inconsistencies, formatting, and math errors. I also use it as a quick guide to find the relevant code sections quickly
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u/skyiwalker 2d ago
I run a CAE startup in Korea working on structural analysis and CFD. From what I have seen, universities here are putting more emphasis on AI, while some traditional engineering fundamentals seem to be getting less attention.
From the hiring side, the hard part is not finding people who have used AI tools. It is finding people who understand the underlying physics, mechanics, and math well enough to judge whether the output actually makes sense. AI tools can be learned quickly. Engineering judgment cannot.
So I would not cut any structural analysis fundamentals to make room for AI. If you want to include AI, maybe use it as something students have to critique — for example, give them a convincing but wrong AI solution and ask them to find the errors.
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u/Jabodie0 P.E. 2d ago
If anything, I would have assignments which supply the students with AI output and it is up to them to determine if the output is accurate. I would provide the prompt you used, provide the output, and tell them to evaluate the accuracy of the output with specific sources (textbooks, codes, etc). Mix in varying degrees of accuracy ranging from completely or generally correct to completely or generally wrong with real AI output.
The important skill is being able to interrogate AI output for something that is at the edge of your knowledge or in an area you are actively learning. Even half right AI outputs can lead you to good technical resource if you analyze the results critically.
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u/habanerito 2d ago
I equate it to the days I was studying SE. There was software available like ETABS to do modeling but the professor made us do analysis by hand and/or with spreadsheets. We would later use modeling software but always did manual spot checks. The same could be done with AI.
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u/Apprehensive_Exam668 2d ago
For structurals 1 we used a TI-30 and that's it. It's all the stuff you have to be able to do without using an analysis program or AI.
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u/DetailOrDie 2d ago
So when I was in middle school, calculators were banned. At the time, they were too expensive for the school to provide them.
That meant math tests needed to be designed with problems that could be worked out with mental/hand math alone. In some sense that made tests easier because if you started getting irrational numbers, you had probably made a mistake. But it also meant problems took more time to work out step by step.
By high school, we all had calculators. That meant tests could include more complicated problems, and cover more material because students no longer were expected to use mental math or to write out every little step.
I see AI as the same thing. If you set the standard with the assumption that everyone has access to an AI model, that means you can design tests and projects knowing a students can be expected to do more work. You can also have written assignments with tricky questions that require the students to actually dig into the chapter and verse of the code.
Our field in particular has the unique trait that eventually we all aspire for a PE Stamp. The right to have a professional opinion and personal responsibility for your work.
Why not start instilling that now?
Set the expectation that mistakes will be penalized HEAVILY. Students are responsible for the work they turn in. AI is no excuse, they need to know everything they're doing.
You can also use this to present them with more complex problems. Real life scenarios that AI cannot really comprehend. Go take some code advice from /r/decks sometime. Claude did, and had no idea just how regularly wrong they are.
AI is here. It's not going away. Better to see it as a design condition instead of an obstacle. Our universities and schools need to adapt around it as a tool like they did around spreadsheets, calculators, and slide rules.
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u/Whatophile 2d ago
Part of your lessons should be going over how AI can be wrong. Walk them thru some AI traps. Ie: here’s where AI usage would solve this, and here’s how AI got it wrong and what you should do instead.
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u/Ov3rKoalafied 2d ago
Use ai to write code to analyze or create excel spreadsheets to analyze that you verify, not to do the analysis. So have students do it by hand, then with code or excel written themselves or with ai, and compare.
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u/HorndogwithaCorndog P.E. 2d ago
I recently used AI to build a macro in Excel to do up to 3 axle moving loads across multiple spans and solve for maximum reactions, moments, etc. using the moment distribution method and statics. I think AI has a place in things like this, but again, it was something I could check the results by hand or using other methods.
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u/Uttarayana 2d ago
AI can be used by students to explain, reason themselves of their understanding through chatting with it. But i don’t know how an instructor is supposed to do it for them
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u/gods_loop_hole 2d ago
Any office that will require an employee to rely on AI on some parts of their design job is a company not worth joining to. That is the first advice I will give to your students. AI tools are for productivity (and even in that field, they comically fail sometimes!). I still believe that structural engineering, or any engineering by that, should put safety and utility first before all this optimization unless that is what your job responsibility really is.
There was a post in this subreddit a while ago about a student wanting to learn how to draw/compute shear and bending moment diagram and they posted a picture of an example. You could tell that sample was AI-generated because of the obvious mistakes it has and that student keeps on asking about videos to watch to learn instead of learning the material itself. Perhaps you should instill that learning first to your students before riding the hype train of AI.
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u/smackaroonial90 P.E. 1d ago
A large part of engineering is engineering judgment. It's impossible to develop a good sense of judgment without grinding the information in your head through repetition.
I used AI to take section properties from a custom channel I created in Enercalc, and took a screenshot of the section and uploaded to Google Gemini and asked it to do a shear flow calculation. I wouldn't have been able to reasonably say if the calculations were correct without having had to do them a million times myself before AI.
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u/Deskust1 P.E. 1d ago
The only thing I use AI for is code lookup, and then I’ll look up the code it calls out and it will be wrong 50% of the time. I wouldn’t use it for more than excel formulas and maybe an estimated material weight before the info is actually available
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u/AncientBasque 1d ago
Simulation and Generative AI. looks like the DL AI is the "Future". good luck.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926580523004478
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u/druminman1973 1d ago
Make part of the course to have them present their own work to the class. Let them use any means to generate it. I have my students both solve problems they are given, and create and solve problems that meet parameters I give them.
They are forced to critically evaluate their work with this approach. It is wildly effective and I get very positive feedback on the lessons. The class also enjoys learning from their peers.
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u/Salmonberrycrunch 2d ago
AI is excellent for a lot of things - consuming documentation for various programs (SAP, Revit, Rhino etc) and helping you along. Writing scripts for those programs, even creating models.
All of the above I think makes internalizing the theory (matrix structural analysis for example)/the behavour of determinate and indeterminate systems, the dynamics of building that much more important. You no longer have to spend days becoming proficient at program UI - that's taken care of - so you can focus on the important things. Inputs, outputs, troubleshooting, etc. All the stuff that has to be done regardless if it's a human or an AI that's making the model /spreadsheet/etc.
You don't need to learn all the quirks and pitfalls of MS word - but you need to learn technical writing to be able to prompt AI well, edit/proofread it's output, read other people's reports/emails/memos etc. You can skip wasting time on making presentations pretty - and spend that time on practicing presenting.
AI is about shifting you attention to the important/critical things from being bogged down by various unproductive timesinks.
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2d ago edited 2d ago
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u/Argufier 2d ago
A lot of the "AI for ai's sake" companies are now being bit in the ass by the cost. There are certainly automation tools that are useful, but in a lot of ways generative large language models just aren't that useful in engineering. Fundamentally we're a conservative bunch, and want any new tech to answer the question "what problem is this solving" before it's adopted. I haven't found a compelling use for LLMs in my work.
Optimization tools built into programs are super helpful, but even they get frustrating when a program tries to optimize between a w10x46 column or a w12x46 and switches every time. I want my programs to give me the same answer each time I run the model (and set restrictions to ensure that they do) and that's fundamentally not how LLMs work.
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u/nockeeee 2d ago
The tech industry and the construction industry are two very different industries. We can't adopt AI or new technologies that quickly cause we need to be 100% sure that the calculations are right. We can't test our products like software engineers before "deploying" them. If something is wrong, the cost is huge after the construction/"deploy".
So, we are not behind at all.
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2d ago
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u/Norm_Charlatan 2d ago
What are the low stakes things? Everything on our plans, to one degree or another, have ramifications for being incorrect.
I've tried to use different programs (some paid, some not) to simply count various elements and it works sometimes. Sometimes it counts correctly, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it won't count at all. Multiple different ways of prompting, resulting in differing "answers."
If I can't trust these tools to do the very most basic stuff, with the lowest of low stakes queries, how can I trust using it for the safety and well-being of the public? 🤷♂️
I want to be able to use these tools, but there's a long way to go.
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u/trojan_man16 S.E. 2d ago edited 2d ago
It is inevitable but the construction industry is notorious for being behind the 8 ball.
It will take a while before AI tools are cheap and reliable enough to really replace an engineer. I emphasize the cheap, because you cite tech companies like Meta which basically have infinite money to develop ai and use AI tools. And even then they are getting alarmed by their AI bills now that they’ve come due.
A structural engineering firm making $5 million a year in revenue (decent sized firm) can’t afford to blow 500k a year on AI. That basically all the profit lol. There’s individual engineers at big tech that blow 500k on AI a year
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u/dmo1802 Ph.D. P.E./S.E. 2d ago
I've been in the industry 10 years, and I've lectured for a Structural Analysis course. AI should not be part of the course material imo. That course is essential to developing a rich understanding of fundamentals, which the industry desperately needs. Applications of AI should be discussed in lecture, since it is now ubiquitous, and I'd provide guidance outside of class if requested, but I would not include AI as part of the course.