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.”

  • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
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    5 months ago

    Don’t mean to victim blame but i don’t understand why you would use ChatGPT for hard problems like optimization. And i say this as a heavy ChatGPT/Copilot user.

    From my observation, the angle of LLMs on code is linked to the linguistic / syntactic aspects, not to the technical effects of it.

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Because I had some methods I thought were too complex and I wanted to see what it’d come up with?

      In one case part of the method was checking if a value was within one of 4 ranges and it just dropped 2 of the ranges in the output.

      I don’t think that’s asking too much of it.

      • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
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        5 months ago

        I don’t think that’s asking too much of it.

        Apparently it was :D i mean the confines of the tool are very limited, despite what the Devin.ai cult would like to believe.