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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] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's a distinction without a difference. The code is useful because we can reason how it was made and we can then make deterministic changes. Try using a compiler that gives you a qualitatively different result each time it runs even though the inputs are the same.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's useful because it does the stuff we want it to do.

You're focusing on a very high level philosophical meaning of "usefulness." I'm focusing on what actually does what I need it to do.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm providing explicit examples of compilers doing "the stuff we want it to do". LLMs do what the want 50% of the time and it still needs modifications afterwards. Imagine having to correct a compiler output and calling that compiler "useful".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

So if something isn't perfect it's not "useful?"

I use LLMs when programming. Despite their imperfection they save me an enormous amount of time. I can confidently confirm that LLMs are useful from personal direct experience.