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ChatGPT Answers Programming Questions Incorrectly 52% of the Time: Study

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

To make matters worse, programmers in the study would often overlook the misinformation.

ChatGPT Answers Programming Questions Incorrectly 52% of the Time: Study

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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  • So it is incorrect and verbose, but also comprehensive and using a well-articulated language style at the same time?

    Also "study participants still preferred ChatGPT answers 35% of the time", meaning that the overwhelming majority (two-thirds) did not prefer the bot answers over the human(e), correct ones, that maybe were not phrased as confidently as they could have been.

    Just say it out loud: ChatGPT is style over substance, aka Fox News. 🦊

    • ChatGPT is not good enough to use as a substitute for (whatever), but can be a useful tool for someone who can quantify its output.

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