With developers preferring ChatGPT more, will this bring an end to stack overflow?
Programmers can ask questions and find answers on Stack Overflow. It serves as the Stack Exchange Network’s flagship website. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood developed it in 2008. It includes queries and responses about certain computer programming subjects. It was developed as a more inclusive substitute for prior question-and-answer sites like Experts-Exchange. Through membership and active engagement, users can vote questions and answers up or down in a manner like Reddit and modify questions and answers in a manner akin to a wiki. The website acts as a platform for users to ask and answer questions.
The go-to resource for all programmers has always been Stack Overflow, the developer-focused Q&A site. It is a sizable community where people may communicate and work together. Last December the forum decided to prohibit posting information produced by ChatGPT due to the significant degree of inaccuracy in the responses the bot delivers, which can be “substantially harmful to the sites and the users looking for correct answers.” And eventually, this ban on ChatGPT didn’t end well for Stack Overflow. Reports by Similar Web mention a 12% decrease in the number of website visits after the release of ChatGPT in November. And even though they rose in January the number dropped even lower in February. For all these years’ developers have tried to copy code from Stack Overflow. And presently, ChatGPT is manipulating them to believe that the code is original even if it’s not. ChatGPT offers developers the convenience of posting questions and getting immediate responses over-explaining every single step of the problem in Stack Overflow.
The intriguing connection between Stack Overflow and ChatGPT is that the LLM-based chatbot is trained using the information found there. This is supported by the GPT-3 paper’s statement that it was trained on a variety of datasets, including Common Crawl, which is practically equivalent to the entire internet. There is no reason to think that Stack Overflow is not included in the training data unless OpenAI took proactive measures to do so. As a result, ChatGPT is a very practical tool for developers. Since ChatGPT is built on the information from Stack Overflow, it may provide the ideal solution without the user having to spend hours searching through the site to find the ideal response to their question. Because the developer community is centered on Stack Overflow, ChatGPT faces a challenging task. Since the introduction of ChatGPT, many users have stopped visiting Stack Overflow altogether, yet no chatbot, including ChatGPT, can ever replace the opportunity to discuss answers.
Similar to Stack Overflow, ChatGPT’s methodology is not perfect and is rife with thousands of incorrect, pointless answers. Therefore, ChatGPT will inevitably provide misleading answers if it is trained on all of Stack Overflow’s data and not just the most popular responses. This has occurred on numerous occasions, finally prompting consumers to return to the internet. It is not a good idea to put too much faith in the chatbot’s responses.
Recently, OpenAI made another significant advancement toward resolving the reliability issue. Developers may now check their code on the chatbot thanks to the release of the Code Interpreter plugin for ChatGPT. Currently, ChatGPT Plus, which utilizes GPT-4, is the only platform that supports this plugin. The internet can also be accessed by developers through Bing Chat in addition to ChatGPT. This enables them to combine code with up-to-date information and advance through ChatGPT’s 2021 dataset cut-off. On the other hand, some developers describe it as “toxic”. Many users think that developers use Stack Overflow to criticize others rather than using it as a Q&A site, even if it is not fair to represent the entire community in the same light.
Right now, it seems improbable that Stack Overflow would accept AI technologies on its site. The way Getty Images responded to Stack Overflow’s decision to remove ChatGPT responses is similar to how Shutterstock, a competitor, opted to accept AI art on their stock image marketplace by paying the original artists. Similarly, Stack Overflow may be able to deal with and adjust to this shifting terrain if it so chooses.
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