Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.
The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.
What happened?
ChatGPT has no knowledge of the answers it gives. It is simply a text completion algorithm. It is fundamentally the same as the thing above your phone keyboard that suggests words as you type, just with much more training data.
Yeah it gives you the answers you ask it to give you. It doesn’t matter if they are true or not, only if they look like the thing you’re looking for.
An incorrect answer can still be valuable. It can give some hint of where to look next.
How is that practically different from a user perspective than answers on SO? Either way, I still have to try the suggested solutions to see if they work in my particular situation.
There was a story once that said if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters, they would eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare.
So far, the Internet has not shown that to be true. Example: Twitter.
Now we have an artificial monkey remixing all of that, at our request, and we’re trying to find something resembling Hamlet’s Soliloquy in what it tells us. What it gives you is meaningless unless you interpret it in a way that works for you – how do you know the answer is correct if you don’t test it? In other words, you have to ensure the answers it gives are what you are looking for.
In that scenario, it’s just a big expensive rubber duck you are using to debug your work.
There’s a bunch of people telling you “ChatGPT helps me when I have coding problems.” And you’re responding “No it doesn’t.”
Your analogy is eloquent and easy to grasp and also wrong.
