this post was submitted on 25 May 2024

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

submitted 5 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] 14th_cylon@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

It is arbitrary to choose that all the good ideas came from “humans”.

no, it is not. ALL ideas come from humans. period. machines don't have an idea. they are tool aimed by a person with the idea. go there, sift through this pile of data and find a pattern in it.

If we are going to give all credit for anything AI produces to humans

we generally don't give a credit to tools. we don't give a credit to keyboard, microscope, centrifuge, a car, or any other tool we use in our lives. we give credit to people with ideas using these tools.

then it only seems fair to give all credit for human things to our common ancestors with chimpanzees, because if it were not for their clever ideas, we would never have been here.

no, it doesn't seem fair to give them all credit for human things, but it seems fair to give them credit for their own actions.

But wait, we can’t stop there, because we have to give credit to the original single-celled life forms, and eventually, back to the universe itself(like I mentioned before).

it seems that extending an argument to stupid proportion so you can attack it is your favorite logical fallacy.

Look, I totally get the desire to want to glorify humans and think that we have something special that machines don’t/can’t have.

oh, the good old "lets be reasonable" approach 😆

to what is right around the corner.

got tired of arguing, so you decided to just present your position as a fact? there is lot of things "right around the corner", but general artificial intelligence is not one of them. that doesn't mean it is never coming, but it is absolutely not "just around the corner".

There is not some magical difference between our calculations that make it so we can make discoveries and machines cannot.

yes, there is, and it is the very difference between GAI, which we have no idea how to approach today, and single purpose tool to sift through some data, which we have today.

so far we have no idea what that missing peace is, when we find out, that is going the be the breakthrough.

Imagine you teach your little brother how to play chess

i like how you argue against yourself.

your brother trying to beat the chess is not making any kind of discovery, is not "having ideas".

he is trying to brute force best way through rigid set of rules,, which is indeed something that machines are better than us, because they are faster than us.

when some day a machine wakes up and gets an idea (be it inventing new game other than chess, composing a song to express its feelings, or "i wonder what happens if i do this") let me know.

Your whole point is that if people do it, then it is some special discovery thing, but if computers do it, then it is just computational brute force. There is actually no difference between the two, (...) We made programs (... ) and then it went further and in the same direction that we were trying to go.

when i teach a dog to run through agility course, it will run through it faster then i ever will. there is still difference between me and the dog.

The usual speedup when we go from using generalized hardware to specialized is about 5 orders of magnitude(10,000x).

i would be interested in reading something about this, if you have a link, because from what i have been able to google, that statement is gross exaggeration.

but no matter what - even if this hardware will exist, and will exist for affordable monetary and energetic price - that is still just speed. it is not going to help chatgpt to pretend to be better chatbot, when it already learned on all written sum of human knowledge, but can't differentiate between trustworthy source and the onion.

it will for sure help lot of single purpose tools used for scientific research and i wish it to scientist as much as better microscopes, but the speed in itself does not constitute intelligence.

I understand wanting to see humans as having a monopoly on “intelligence”, but quite frankly that era is coming to an end.

i see you are big fan of the industry, but i would give you your own advice: don't let your ego stand in the way of your judgement 😆

[–] AIhasUse@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The 5 orders of magnitude gained from general computers to asics is standard knowledge, you learn it in the first year of any comp sci class. You can find it all over, for example.

The main thing that you are missing is that the human mind also brute forces to come up with ideas. There isn't a difference. We don't have some super magical mystical human thing that sets us apart.

A way to imagine how it can be possible for a computer to have thoughts and ideas just like humans is this: Imagine you take a human brain and you switch out one neuron for an electrical part, and you leave the rest of the brain as it is. Can that brain have thoughts and ideas like a human? Obviously, yes. What if you switch out another one? And another. If each electrical neuron is doing the same thing as the original one, then eventually you could switch out the entire brain and have an entirely computer brain doing exactly what a human does. At what point would you say that this machine is no longer doing what a human does and just "Brute forcing" ideas?

I totally get that right now, with lots of jobs at risk, many people are really concerned with holding onto the idea that hunans have a monopoly on thinking and thoughts. I think it's important to now let what we want to be true to interfere with our analysis of what is true.

[–] 14th_cylon@lemm.ee 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The 5 orders of magnitude gained from general computers to asics is standard knowledge, you learn it in the first year of any comp sci class. You can find it all over, for example.

so, it is just your wishful thinking. you have no proof that this is going to be true, you just blindly extrapolate from the past... wait, that is how this discussion started... 😂

There isn’t a difference. We don’t have some super magical mystical human thing that sets us apart.

yes, there is, i have already answered that.

A way to imagine how it can be possible for a computer to have thoughts and ideas

just imagine this thing that is at the moment impossible and we have no idea how to do it or whether it will ever be possible.

and see, once you imagine this impossible thing becoming true, this other impossible thing also becomes true.

q.e.d.

how easy, huh 😂

I think it’s important to now let what we want to be true to interfere with our analysis of what is true.

if only you would take your own medicine.

[–] AIhasUse@lemmy.world -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The past is where we get all of our information from. To pretend like we can't use the past to predict the future makes us unable to do anything. We don't have a time machine to go see exactly how the future plays out.

It is more common than you realise for their to be predictable trends in computing. Just go look at Moore's law and how long it has held up(with just minor adjustments). What would be way more surprising is if we are all of a sudden at a massive turning point where we can no longer anticipate what is next. You don't have to take my word for this. Find anyone with a background in computing to independently verify it. Even chatgpt could really help you understand this.

The specialized hardware efficiency gain isn't even a mystery at all. It is simply the consequence of designing hardware that does a specific task very well. It isn't nearly as much of a guess as you think it is. To help you picture it, imagine a vehicle that works on land, sea, and sky. It is not such a leap to say that a vehicle made to work for just the land would be much more efficient at being on land. This really isn't anything that anyone in the computing world disagrees with. It is just your outsider point of view that is making it seem like magic to you. Again, don't take my word. This is comp science 101 stuff that really isn't disputed.

So far as the thought experiment with replacing neurons. The technology to do so doesn't need to exist for the point to hold true. That simply isn't a logical requirement for thought experiments. This has nothing to do with computing or anything. This is just true of logical arguments. In order to make points, we can use thought experiments. This is something that Einstein was famous for, and not many people question his ability to form solid arguments.

I understand that you feel passionate about this, and you really want this idea that humans are somehow magical and fundamentally different from machines. It really is understandable. I've given plenty of solid arguments that you really haven't responded to at all. It has never been true that people can't use thought experiments or past trends to help make conclusions about the future. It is very telling that these are things that you feel like you must discard in order to defend your stance. These are both things that have been reliably used for hundreds and even thousands of years.

I would really encourage you to get ahold of some logical reasoning material and try to take a step back to some basics if this is something that you are interested in digging a bit deeper into this. It is almost never the case that initial hunches turn out to be kept after thurough investigation.

[–] 14th_cylon@lemm.ee -1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

jesus fucking christ, are you using some chatbot to drown me in a wall of text? just stop...

We don’t have a time machine to go see exactly how the future plays out.

if you think you know exactly how the future plays out, you are just insane. i am not reading the rest of it. bye.

[–] AIhasUse@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

You've completely misunderstood. I specifically said we don't have a time machine to see how the future plays out. All we can do is make our best guesses based on the past.

You've had to throw away basic reasoning tools that have been used for ages in order for your stance to remain "safe." I understand your fear, but honestly, you are better off embracing and understanding instead of putting your head in the sand and saying that we shouldn't use the past to make predictions of the future.

[–] AIhasUse@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I do just want to add that my conclusion is that I, as a human, am not uniquely special for having the ability to have thoughts, ideas, and come up with new things. This point of view is inherently a massive blow to the human ego. It simply doesn't make any sense to hold such a view if one's ego is what is controlling the judgment. The same can not be said about the opposite viewpoint.

[–] 14th_cylon@lemm.ee -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I do just want to add that my conclusion is that I, as a human, am not uniquely special for having the ability to have thoughts, ideas, and come up with new things.

of course not. monkeys can do same thing, we have already established that.

machines, however, do not.

[–] AIhasUse@lemmy.world -1 points 5 months ago

Is this something that you think can be proven, or is it just something that we get to know deep down in our souls without any evidence for it?