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.
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. The forum decided to prohibit posting information produced by ChatGPT in December of last year 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.”
The prohibition on ChatGPT, however, did not augur well for Stack Overflow. According to data from SimilarWeb, there was a 12% drop in website visits from 279 million in November to 247 million in December following the launch of ChatGPT. After barely increasing to 249 million in January, the number of website visits decreased.
The Stack Overflow team had informed AIM that the decrease in visits in December was only attributable to the holiday season. The team explained to AIM that the decrease in February was due to fewer days in the month; nevertheless, if everyday users are included, the number really grew. Even if that is the case, the analysis from SimilarWeb raises the question of whether or not users are switching from Stack Overflow to ChatGPT. Why is it possible that’s the case?
ChatGPT is far too practical.
For years, programmers have been stealing code from Stack Overflow. Now, ChatGPT leads users to assume that it is authentic even though it is not. It is far too convenient for developers to ask inquiries on ChatGPT and receive prompt responses rather than visiting Stack Overflow and thoroughly outlining the issue.
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.
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 absolutely not a good idea to put too much faith in the chatbot’s responses.
But OpenAI recently made another significant step towards resolving the reliability issue. Developers may now check their own code on the chatbot thanks to the release of the Code Interpreter plugin for ChatGPT. Currently, ChatGPT Plus, which utilises GPT-4, is the only platform that supports this plugin.
