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

submitted 5 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] -3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Anyone else tired of these clickbait headlines and studies about LLM which center around fundamental misunderstandings of how LLMs work, or is it just me?

"ChatGPT didn't get a single answer on my algebra exam correct!!" Well yes, because LLMs work on predictive generation, not traditional calculation, so of course they're not going to do math or anything else with non-language-based patterns properly. That's what a calculator is for.

All of these articles are like complaining that a chainsaw is an inefficient tool for driving nails into wood. Yeah; because that's not the job this tool was made for.

And it's so stupid because there are ton of legitimate criticisms about AI and the AI rollout to be had; we don't have to look for disingenuous cases of misuse for critique.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That would be fine, if people weren't using LLMs to write code, or to do school work,

But they are. So it's important to write these articles that say "if you keep using a chainsaw to drive nails, here are the limitations you need to be aware of."

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago

I see your point and I agree, except that that isn't what these headlines are saying. Granted, perhaps that's just the standard issue of sensationalism and clickbait rather than being specific to this issue, but the point remains that while the articles may be as you claim, the headlines are still presented instead as "A chainsaw can't even drive a simple nail into wood without issue and that's why you should be angry anytime you hear a chainsaw." I dunno. I'm just so exhausted.