Is Stack Overflow Obsolete? An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of ChatGPT Answers to Stack Overflow Questions
Samia Kabir, David N. Udo-Imeh, Bonan Kou, Tianyi Zhang

TL;DR
This study analyzes ChatGPT's answers to Stack Overflow questions, revealing issues with correctness and verbosity, while also noting user preferences for its comprehensive and articulate responses despite misinformation risks.
Contribution
First comprehensive empirical analysis of ChatGPT answers to programming questions, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses compared to traditional Q&A platforms.
Findings
52% of ChatGPT answers contain incorrect information
77% of answers are verbose
Users prefer ChatGPT answers 35% of the time despite misinformation
Abstract
Q&A platforms have been crucial for the online help-seeking behavior 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 answers 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, consistency, 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 answers 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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsTopic Modeling · Software Engineering Research · Misinformation and Its Impacts
