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.”
If you ask the wrong questions you get the wrong results. If you don’t check the response for accuracy, you get invalid answers.
It’s just a tool. Don’t use it wrong because you’re lazy.
Lemmy is trying really, really hard to convince you that coding is going to be a viable career in 5 years.
Lemmy is trying real hard to convince you that AI is going to do everyone’s job in 5 years—including yours
They’ve done studies: 48% of the time, it works every time.
ChatGPT and github copilot are great tools, but they’re like a chainsaw: if you apply them incorrectly or become too casual and careless with them, they will kickback at you and fuck your day up.
I just use it to get ideas about how to do something or ask it to write short functions for stuff i wouldnt know that well. I tried using it to create graphical ui for script but that was constant struggle to keep it on track. It managed to create something that kind of worked but it was like trying to hold 2 magnets of opposing polarity together and I had to constantly reset the conversation after it got “corrupted”.
Its useful tool if you dont rely on it, use it correctly and dont trust it too much.
I couldn’t have said it better
This has been true for code you pull from posts on stackoverflow since forever. There are some good ideas, but they a. Aren’t exactly what you are trying to solve and b. Some of the ideas are incomplete or just bad and it is up to you to sort the wheat from the chaff.
“Major new Technology still in Infancy Needs Improvements”
– headline every fucking day
in Infancy Needs Improvements
I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say that if we have to invest in new energy sources just to make these tools functionably usable… maybe we’re better off just paying people to do these jobs instead of burning the planet to a rocky dead husk to achieve AI?
Just playing devil’s advocate here, but if we could get to a future with algorithms so good they are essentially a talking version of all human knowledge, this would be a great thing for humanity.
this would be a great thing for humanity.
That’s easy to say. Tell me how. Also tell me how to do it without it being biased about certain subjects over others. Captain Beatty would wildly disagree with this even being possible. His whole shtick in Fahrenheit 451 is that all the books disagreed with one another, so that’s why they started burning them.
There’s this series of books called the www series, about AI before AI was the new hot thing every company needed to mention at least once to get stock price to go up.
Tap for spoiler
Essentially an AI popped up on the internet, which was able to read everything. Due to this it was able to combine data in such a way that it found things like a cure for cancer by combining research papers that no one had ever combined. This is a very bad explanation, but I could see how this makes sense.
Spoiler free explanation: no human has read everything, I think there could be big implications if there’s an AI that has that can see connections that no one ever has.
they are essentially a talking version of all human knowledge
“Obama is a Muslim”
We already had that with search engines and the world wide web.
But let’s say some company did it, a perfect AI that has read everything and doesn’t hallucinate.
A researcher is working on some experiments, if they could just route it through the AI, and it would annalyse if that experiment was even possible, maybe already done, this could speed up research.
With a truly perfect model, which the tech bros are aiming for, I can see the potential for good. I ofcourse am skeptical such a model is possible, but… I kinda see why it would be nice to have.
“Corporation using immature technology in productions because it’s cool”
More news at eleven
This is scary because up to now, all software released worked exactly as intended so we need to be extra special careful here.
Yes, and we never have and never will put lives in the hands of software developers before!
Tap for spoiler
/s…for this comment and the above one, for anyone who needs it
“Will this technology save us from ourselves, or are we just jerking off?”
The way I see it, we’re finally sliding down the trough of disillusionment.
I’m honestly a bit jealous of you. You are going to be so amazed when you realise this stuff is just barely getting started. It’s insane what people are already building with agents. Once this stuff gets mainstream, and specialized hardware hits the market, our current paradigm is going to seem like silent black and white films compared to what will be going on. By 2030 we will feel like 2020 was half a century ago at least.
Looking forward to it, but won’t be disappointed if it takes a bit longer than expected.
Ray Kurzweil has a phenomenal record of making predictions. He’s like 90% or something and has been saying AGI by 2029 for something like 30+ years. Last I heard, he is sticking with it, but he admits he may be a year or two off in either direction. AGI is a pretty broad term, but if you take it as “better than nearly every human in every field of expertise,” then I think 2029 is quite reasonable.
That’s not very far in the future, so it’s going to be really exciting to see how that works out.
Maybe only 51% of the code it writes needs to be good before it can self-improve. In which case, we’re nearly there!
We are already past that. The 48% is from a version of chatgpt(3.5) that came out a year ago, there has been lots of progress since then.
unready technology that spews dangerous misinformation in the most convincing way possible is being massively promoted
Yeah, because no human would convincingly lie on the internet. Right, Arthur?
It’s literally built on what confidently incorrect people put on the internet. The only difference is that there are constant disclaimers on it saying it may give incorrect information.
Anyone too stupid to understand how to use it is too stupid to use the internet safely anyways. Or even books for that matter.
Holy mother of false equivalence. Google is not supposed to be a random dude on the Internet, it’s supposed to be a reference tool, and for the most part it was a good one before they started enshittifying it.
Google is a search engine. It points you to web pages that are made by people. Many times, the people who make those websites have put things on them that are knowingly or unknowingly incorrect but said in an authoritative manner. That was all I was saying, nothing controversial. That’s been a known fact for a long time. You can’t just read something on a single site and then be sure that it has to be true. I get that there are people who strangely fall in love with specific websites and think they are absolute truth, but thats always been a foolish way to use the internet.
A great example of people believing blindly is all these horribly doctored google ai images saying ridiculous things. There are so many idiots that think every time they see a screenshot of Google ai saying something absurd that it has to be true. People have even gone so far as to use ridiculous fonts just to point out how easy it is to get people to trust anything. Now there’s a bunch of idiots that think all 20 or so Google ai mistakes they’ve seen are all genuine, so much so that they think almost all Google ai responses are incorrect. Some people are very stupid. Sorry to break it to you, but LLMs are not the first thing to put incorrect information on the internet.
Yes there are mistakes, but if you direct it to the right direction, it can give you correct answers
In my experience, if you have the necessary skills to point it at the right direction, you don’t need to use it at the first place
Yesterday, I wrote all of this, working javascript code https://github.com/igorlogius/gather-from-tabs/discussions/8 And I don’t know a lick of javascript I know other languages but that barely was needed. I just gave it plain language instructions and reported the errors until it worked.
So we should all live alone in the woods in shacks we built for ourselves, wearing the pelts of random animals we caught and ate?
Just because I have the skills to live like a savage doesn’t mean I want to. Hell, even the idea of glamping sounds awful to me.
No thanks, I will use modern technology to ease my life just as much as I can.Bruh, where in my comment did I tell people not to use it?
you don’t need to use it at the first place
Bad reading comprehension is bad.
Drunk posting is sad.
it’s just a convenience, not a magic wand. Sure relying on AI blindly and exclusively is a horrible idea (that lots of people peddle and a quite a few suckers buy), but there’s room for a supervised and careful use of AI, same as we started using google instead of manpages and (grudgingly, for the older of us) started tolerating the addition of syntax highlighting and even some code completion to even the most basic editors.
AI is a tool, not a solution.
It can, it also sometimes can’t unless you ask it “could it be x answer”
C-suites:
tHis iS inCReDibLe! wE cAn SavE sO MUcH oN sTafFiNg cOStS!
Sure does, but even when wrong it still gives a good start. Meaning in writing less syntax.
Particularly for boring stuff.
Example: My boss is a fan of useMemo in react, not bothered about the overhead, so I just write a comment for the repetitive stuff like sorting easier to write
// Sort members by last name ascendingAnd then pressing return a few times. Plus with integration in to Visual Studio Professional it will learn from your other files so if you have coding standards it’s great for that.
Is it perfect? No. Does it same time and allow us to actually solve complex problems? Yes.
Agreed and i have the exact same approach. It’s like having a colleague next to you who’s not very good but who’s super patient and always willing to help. It’s like having a rubber duck on Adderall who has read all the documentation that exists.
It seems people are in such a hurry to reject this technology that they fall into the age old trap of forming completely unrealistic expectations then being disappointed when they don’t pan out.
Exactly. I suspect many of the people that complain about its inadequacies don’t really work in an industry that can leverage the potential of this tool.
You’re spot on about the documentation aspect. I can install a package and rely on the LLM to know the methods and such and if it doesn’t, then I can spend some time to read it.
Also, I suck at regex but writing a comment about what the regex will do will make the LLM do it for me. Then I’ll test it.
Honestly i started at a new job 2 weeks ago and i’ve been breezing through subjects (notably thanks to ChatGPT) at an alarming rate. I’m happy, the boss is happy, OpenAI get their 20 bucks a month. It’s fascinating to read all the posts from people who claim it cannot generate any good code - sounds like a skill issue to me.
Not a programmer by any means (haven’t done any since college) but I’ve asked it for help in writing Jira queries or Excel mess and it’s been pretty solid with that stuff.
I guess it depends on the programming language… With python, I got very fast great results. But python is all about quick and dirty 😂
In Rust, it’s not great. It can’t do proper memory management in the language, which is pretty essential.
I asked ChatGPT for assistance with JavaScript doing HL7 stuff and it was a joke… After the seventh correction I gave up on it (at least for that task)
Actually the 4o version feels worse than the 4. Im getting tons of wrong answers now…
Yeah, it’s not supposed to be better than 4 for logic/reason/coding, etc… its strong points are it’s natural voice interaction, ability to react to streaming video, and its fast and efficient inference. The good voice and video are not available to many people yet. It is so efficient that it is going to be available to free users. If you want good reasoning, then you need to stick with 4 for now, or better yet, switch to something like Claude Opus. If you really want strong reasoning abilities, then at this point, you need a setup using agents, but that requires some research and understanding.
I always thought of it as a tool to write boilerplate faster, so no surprises for me
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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
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.
I’m curious about what percentage of programmers would give error free answers to these questions in seconds.
Probably less than the same amount of developers whose code runs on the first try.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My favorite is when I ask for something and it gets stuck in a loop, pasting the same comment over and over
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