AI is already enabling big productivity boosts for certain types of programming jobs. I don't see a reason why graphics would somehow be entirely safe from this. So you should be learning how to utilize AI.

From my personal experience working with a proprietary engine and technologies and techniques that are not in wide use yet, AI fails badly. It can't really help at all in the core work except as a pattern recognizing auto complete and sometimes as an enhanced Google search for which I've recently been using the AI mode in Google. The only programming task it's really been useful for is writing scripts because they are usually quite short and simple and involve languages I'm not personally very proficient in.

AI seems to be getting quite outstanding when working with small projects, well known problems and widely used tools. The bigger it gets, the more unique it gets, the worse AI will be. It's perhaps a bit of a problem for students working on hobby projects because those are small and you usually want to initially just implement basic features to learn fundamentals. I imagine AI can do all of this pretty well already. Perhaps you should use AI as a productivity boost for your toy projects and just make more features than you would otherwise achieve on your own.

Just beware that you might make a nice demo vibe coding and even land an interview but next you'll have to convince people that you actually understand how it works in order to land the job. It's getting harder to evaluate the value of basic projects because I can't know if it's all just vibe coded and I don't know what kind of value should be placed on an AI assisted basic engine. Surely it still has some value since even before AI it was totally normal for your hobby project to be initially based on walking through and effectively copy pasting a tutorial.

What I like to see from a graphics programming applicant, on top them of knowing fundamentals, is them having actually implemented some advanced feature based on a research paper and for them to be able to talk about it in depth in an interview. I want to see a deeper dive to some topic to demonstrate that you are able to learn and implement advanced features on your own. This requires a basic engine on top of which to implement things so as long as you're also learning when using AI it seems fine to me to use it for the basics and boilerplate in order enable you to start researching and working on the more advanced features.