Most questions on SO these days are very specific so I doubt ChatGPT would be able to come up with good answers for those. All the easy questions have been answered long ago.
Especially since ChatGPT can't think of a new answer, right? It's working off data that's already somewhere online. It's just using predictive text based to determine the next word based on what users have typed. So most of these answers people get from "AI" are out there for these people to get from real people.
I don't know why you're getting down voted. That is how it works to my understanding (as a layperson). It was fed training data and is very good at predictive text. I don't think it can take concepts it's learned and apply them in novel ways.
This is hilarious but I don't think fully answers the question. This is a good example of something novel that GPT can do, ie manipulating language according to new rules to create rhythm and rhymes.
However, to give a more over the top example: if you removed all mention of planes from its corpus, leaving only information on air resistance and materials science, and then asked it for the best way to cross the Atlantic, it would never invent a plane for you.
Even if it could, there are a lot of APIs or documentation that it hasn't been trained on enough or at all to be able to answer. The models can, at least currently, only contain so much information, so the more specific or detailed the response you need, the worse it'll do.
Deciding what to write next based on what it just wrote is reasoning. So saying "it's just predicting the next word" is very dismissive if you haven't used it.
My personal experience was I spent hours googling a for a script. I gave up and typed my problem into chatgpt. It gave working code in seconds.
It wasn't just cutting and pasting what was already on Google.
I disagree. I use chatgpt all the time where I'll tell it "here's my block of code" then "here's the error message I'm getting, how should I resolve this?" I could easily see it working for stack exchange questions. Chatgpt is useful because it's able to answer specific questions.
Of course there is some percentage of the time where it's completely wrong, but I'd put that under 20% for the questions I ask it. And you can tell it's wrong because the solution doesn't work, but if I'm not familiar with the subject matter I could waste a lot of time before I figure out why it's wrong.