What's especially troubling is that many human programmers seem to prefer the ChatGPT answers. The Purdue researchers polled 12 programmers — admittedly a small sample size — and found they preferred ChatGPT at a rate of 35 percent and didn't catch AI-generated mistakes at 39 percent.
Why is this happening? It might just be that ChatGPT is more polite than people online.
It's probably more because you can ask it your exact question (not just search for something more or less similar) and it will at least give you a lead that you can use to discover the answer, even if it doesn't give you a perfect answer.
Also, who does a survey of 12 people and publishes the results? Is that normal?