Technology

60070 readers

3496 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

767

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

submitted 7 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

186 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

My experience with an AI coding tool today.

Me: Can you optimize this method.

AI: Okay, here's an optimized method.

Me seeing the AI completely removed a critical conditional check.

Me: Hey, you completely removed this check with variable xyz

Ai: oops you're right, here you go I fixed it.

It did this 3 times on 3 different optimization requests.

It was 0 for 3

Although there was some good suggestions in the suggestions once you get past the blatant first error

[–] eupraxia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

That's been my experience with GPT - every answer Is a hallucination to some extent, so nearly every answer I receive is inaccurate in some ways. However, the same applies if I was asking a human colleague unfamiliar with a particular system to help me debug something - their answers will be quite inaccurate too, but I'm not expecting them to be accurate, just to have helpful suggestions of things to try.

I still prefer the human colleague in most situations, but if that's not possible or convenient GPT sometimes at least gets me on the right path.

[–] eatthecake@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm curious about what percentage of programmers would give error free answers to these questions in seconds.

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

Probably less than the same amount of developers whose code runs on the first try.

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

And ya, it did provide some useful info, so it's not like it was all wrong.

I'm more just surprised that it was wrong in that way.

[–] piecat@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

My favorite is when I ask for something and it gets stuck in a loop, pasting the same comment over and over