Stack Overflow, the world's largest software Q&A (SQA) website, is facing a significant traffic drop due to the emergence of generative AI techniques. ChatGPT is banned by Stack Overflow after only 6 days from its release. The main reason provided by the official Stack Overflow is that the answers generated by ChatGPT are of low quality. To verify this, we conduct a comparative evaluation of human-written and ChatGPT-generated answers. Our methodology employs both automatic comparison and a manual study. Our results suggest that human-written and ChatGPT-generated answers are semantically similar, however, human-written answers outperform ChatGPT-generated ones consistently across multiple aspects, specifically by 10% on the overall score. We release the data, analysis scripts, and detailed results at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GAI4SQA-FD5C.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2307.09765,
title = {Are We Ready to Embrace Generative AI for Software Q&A?},
author = {Bowen Xu and Thanh-Dat Nguyen and Thanh Le-Cong and Thong Hoang and Jiakun Liu and Kisub Kim and Chen Gong and Changan Niu and Chenyu Wang and Bach Le and David Lo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09765},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Accepted by the New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) track at The IEEE/ACM Automated Software Engineering (ASE) Conference