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

submitted 6 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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[–] d3Xt3r 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

In the footnotes they mention GPT-3.5. Their argument for not testing 4 was because it was paid, and so most users would be using 3.5 - which is already factually incorrect now because the new GPT-4o (which they don't even mention) is now free. Finally, they didn't mention GPT-4 Turbo either, which is even better at coding compared to 4.

[–] PM_ME_YOUR_ZOD_RUNES@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 months ago

Anyone can use GPT-4 for free. Co-pilot uses GPT-4 and with a Microsoft account you can do up to 30 queries. I've used it a lot to create Excel VBA code for work and it's pretty good. Much better than GPT-3.5 that's for sure.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 6 months ago

4 is free for a very small number of queries, then it switches back to 3.5. Or at least that's what happened to me the other day.