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

submitted 6 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] 19 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Yeah it's wrong a lot but as a developer, damn it's useful. I use Gemini for asking questions and Copilot in my IDE personally, and it's really good at doing mundane text editing bullshit quickly and writing boilerplate, which is a massive time saver. Gemini has at least pointed me in the right direction with quite obscure issues or helped pinpoint the cause of hidden bugs many times. I treat it like an intelligent rubber duck rather than expecting it to just solve everything for me outright.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I tend to agree, but I've found that most LLMs are worse than I am with regex, and that's quite the achievement considering how bad I am with them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Hey, at least we can rest easy knowing that human devs will be needed to write regex for quite a while longer.

... Wait, I'm horrible at Regex. Oh well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Same here. It's good for writing your basic unit tests, and the explain feature is useful getting for getting your head wrapped around complex syntax, especially as bad as searching for useful documentation has gotten on Google and ddg.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

That's a good way to use it. Like every technological evolution it comes with risks and downsides. But if you are aware of that and know how to use it, it can be a useful tool.
And as always, it only gets better over time. One day we will probably rely more heavily on such AI tools, so it's a good idea to adapt quickly.