Preface

In the past when searching for the answer to some problem with your favorite search engine, you could easily find the same answer many times, even though it was obviously wrong (not working). That was (I suspect) due to the fact that may users just copied answers from elsewhere without citing where they got it from, or due to "re-framing", that is some site just placed a new frame and some advertising around another site. Fortunately the latter have vanished mostly meanwhile.

ChatGPT

I think ChatGPT and alike are impressive, but there are still severe problems: I have a (seemingly simple) programming problem that I could't solve myself reading the docs, so I used Google to search for solutions. I had tried a few, but none worked, so I tried ChatGPT.

ChatGPT provided a "solution" that looked similar to the ones I had seen before, but actually it didn't work as well. So I told it that the solution did not work, and ChatGPT provided me with another "solution" (that also did not work).

I think the above clearly shows the problem with ChatGPT: It cannot tell where it got its wisdom from, and the answers may be incorrect without ChatGPT knowing.

Any use?

Still I could imagine (monetary an legal issues left aside) that SO integrates ChatGPT for newly asked (or to be asked) questions:

• It could be used to find similar (equivalent) questions before posting the question. I saw many questions about the same problem (like "find string X in input Y"), where the posters were unable to abstract the problem to the root problem, not even partially.
• It could suggest an "answer" before posting the question: If ChatCPT could provide a correct answer, there's no need to post the question in SO (maybe because the question is rather trivial also).

Preface

In the past when searching for the answer to some problem with your favorite search engine, you could easily find the same answer many times, even though it was obviously wrong (not working).

That was (I suspect) due to the fact that many users just copied answers from elsewhere without citing where they got it from, or due to "re-framing", that is, some site just placed a new frame and some advertising around another site. Fortunately, the latter have vanished mostly meanwhile.

ChatGPT

I think ChatGPT and alike are impressive, but there are still severe problems: I have a (seemingly simple) programming problem that I couldn’t solve myself reading the documentation, so I used Google to search for solutions. I had tried a few, but none worked, so I tried ChatGPT.

ChatGPT provided a "solution" that looked similar to the ones I had seen before, but actually it didn't work either. So I told it that the solution did not work, and ChatGPT provided me with another "solution" (that also did not work).

I think the above clearly shows the problem with ChatGPT: It cannot tell where it got its wisdom from, and the answers may be incorrect without ChatGPT knowing.

Any use?

Still, I could imagine (monetary and legal issues left aside) that SO integrates ChatGPT for newly asked (or to be asked) questions:

• It could be used to find similar (equivalent) questions before posting the question. I saw many questions about the same problem (like "find string X in input Y"), where the posters were unable to abstract the problem to the root problem, not even partially.
• It could suggest an "answer" before posting the question: If ChatGPT could provide a correct answer, there isn't any need to post the question on SO (maybe because the question is rather trivial also).