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  • TECHNOLOGY FEATURE

Six tips for better coding with ChatGPT

Although powerful, the tools are not as intelligent as they seem. Use them with caution, computer scientists warn.
  1. Jeffrey M. Perkel
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Cartoon of two faces with speech bubbles that join together to form code. One of the faces is pixelated to represent a chatbot.

Illustration by The Project Twins

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about ChatGPT. The chatbot, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, provides eerily human-like responses to user questions (called prompts) on almost any subject. ChatGPT is trained on a vast corpus of text, and its ability to engage in text-based conversation means that users can refine its responses. Even if its initial answers are wonky, it often eventually produces accurate results, including software code.

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Nature 618, 422-423 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01833-0

References

  1. Piccolo, S. R. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13528 (2023).

  2. Jesse, K. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11455 (2023).

  3. Pearce, H. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09293 (2021).

  4. Shue, E. et al. Quant. Biol. https://doi.org/10.15302/J-QB-023-0327 (2023).

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