A new (not only for) beginner’s tutorial on NGSolve is available.
Is was prepared by Christoph Lehrenfeld for the 2026 user-meeting.
You find it on NGSolve → Documentation → C. Lehrenfeld is taming the Beast
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Hello, complete beginner here.
First of all I’d like to say thank you for developing, maintaining and supporting NGSolve, and thank you for this tutorial which at first glance (I did not take a lot of time to go through it yet) looks quite complete, with good difficulty progression.
However, I can’t help to share my surprise when I saw illustrations I am 99% sure are at least partially AI-generated (attached screenshot).
I fully understand than this is a free and open-source project and most likely does not have any financial means to hire a graphic designer to do this job, that this tutorial already represents a massive amount of work, and I am grateful for that.
But the use of AI generated graphics bugs me, for ethical, environmental and social reasons.
Moreover, I believe these graphics add very little if anything at all to the value of the tutorial - in fact I believe it would be just better without them, and everything else staying the same.
It also raises the question - if one of the official tutorials uses generative AI, is a part of the software coded with generative AI? Do I put my trust in potentially AI-generated code?
That’s also part of the reasons I think these illustrations make the tutorial less attractive.
I hope this post doesn’t come off as aggressive - just wanted to share my opinion.
In the eventuality I am wrong, maybe crediting the artist would be a good idea then?
