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ChatGPT Answers Programming Questions Incorrectly 52% of the Time: Study (gizmodo.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The research from Purdue University, first spotted by news outlet Futurism, was presented earlier this month at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Hawaii and looked at 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow that were then fed to ChatGPT.

“Our analysis shows that 52% of ChatGPT answers contain incorrect information and 77% are verbose,” the new study explained. “Nonetheless, our user study participants still preferred ChatGPT answers 35% of the time due to their comprehensiveness and well-articulated language style.”

Disturbingly, programmers in the study didn’t always catch the mistakes being produced by the AI chatbot.

“However, they also overlooked the misinformation in the ChatGPT answers 39% of the time,” according to the study. “This implies the need to counter misinformation in ChatGPT answers to programming questions and raise awareness of the risks associated with seemingly correct answers.”

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I’m very familiar with what LLMs do.

You’re misunderstanding what copilot does. It just completes a line or section of code. It doesn’t answer questions - it just continues a pattern. Sometimes quite intelligently.

Shoot me a message on discord and I’ll do a screenshare for you. #locuester

It has improved my quality and speed significantly. More so than any other feature since intellisense was introduced (which many back then also frowned upon).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Fair enough, and thanks for the offer. I found a demo on YouTube. It does indeed look a lot more reasonable than having an LLM actually write the code.

I'm one of the people that don't use IntelliSense, so it's probably not for me, but I can definitely see why people find that particular implementation useful. Thanks for catching and correcting my misunderstanding. :)