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by avg_dev 750 days ago
That article links to the actual paper, the abstract of which is itself quite readable: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3613904.3642596

> Q&A platforms have been crucial for the online help-seeking behav- ior of programmers. However, the recent popularity of ChatGPT is altering this trend. Despite this popularity, no comprehensive study has been conducted to evaluate the characteristics of ChatGPT’s an- swers to programming questions. To bridge the gap, we conducted the first in-depth analysis of ChatGPT answers to 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow and examined the correctness, consis- tency, comprehensiveness, and conciseness of ChatGPT answers. Furthermore, we conducted a large-scale linguistic analysis, as well as a user study, to understand the characteristics of ChatGPT an- swers from linguistic and human aspects. Our analysis shows that 52% of ChatGPT answers contain incorrect information and 77% are verbose. Nonetheless, our user study participants still preferred ChatGPT answers 35% of the time due to their comprehensiveness and well-articulated language style. However, they also overlooked the misinformation in the ChatGPT answers 39% of the time. This implies the need to counter misinformation in ChatGPT answers to programming questions and raise awareness of the risks associated with seemingly correct answers.