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arXiv · 2307.09765

Are We Ready to Embrace Generative AI for Software Q&A?

Bowen Xu·Thanh-Dat Nguyen·Thanh Le-Cong·Thong Hoang·Jiakun Liu·Kisub Kim·Chen Gong·Changan Niu·Chenyu Wang·Bach Le·David Lo
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Abstract

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.

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Bowen Xu, Thanh-Dat Nguyen, Thanh Le-Cong, Thong Hoang, Jiakun Liu, Kisub Kim, Chen Gong, Changan Niu, Chenyu Wang, Bach Le, David Lo. 2023-07-19. Are We Ready to Embrace Generative AI for Software Q&A?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09765

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