Poll is CLOSED
Poll
If deeply integrated with AI assistance in MATLAB Answers, what would you like it to do?
Provide insightful answers
9%
Provide label-AI answer
9%
Provide answer by both AI and human
21%
Do not use AI for answers
46%
Give a button "chat with copilot"
10%
use AI to draft better qustions
5%
1561 votes
17 Comments
Time Descending
There's nothing to stop me asking an AI by other means, this is a forum for help from other humans who genuinely understand the problem, not AI that hallucinates and fails to understand the problem a lot of the time.
I think a better question is to prompt the person asking the question "Have you tried using AI?", and letting them ask their question regardless (if yes, it failed. If no, the user doesn't want to us it).
The online IT news source, TheRegister. has recently reported that AI generated bug reports are now flooding open source maintainers with hallucinated bug reports, none of which are correct, even though they all look plausible at first sight.
In this case, the motivation is to win a bug bounty, but the undesirable side effect is that the number of hallucinated AI reports is so large that the maintainers cannot keep up, and are rejecting AI generated reports as an effective DDOS attack.
There is an obvious long-term problem, which is the problem of how to detect and reject AI hallucinations. This has the potential to destroy the effectiveness of open-source bug reporting, and so make much of the world's software unmaintainable.
I would be concerned if hallucinated AI 'answers' with random errors would similarly pollute the Matlab answers, especially if they spread. The problem is the ease of generating AI falsehoods, and the lack of any internal checks in the AI tools.
There may be use cases where AI generated code can speed up Matlab coding, as long as the original code database used for training is not itself the product of AI coding, in which case hallucinated, wrong code could spread like a viral infection.
The low quality of AI inference when it is not based on a deep understanding of the purpose required may not matter for applications that focus on surface features, but it could impact the reliability of scientific and engineering code.
And what's wrong with the fact that the AI option will be introduced in matlab, because AI is just a program that depends on the computer's power, but if it is oriented to the cloud, for example, then the programming capabilities in mat lab will improve significantly.
MATLAB Copilot is now available in the R2025a desktop version as a beta test. Personally, I find it quite useful. It is positioned to rival the GitHub Copilot VSCode extension,it is the fact that oriented to the cloud. If you're interested, you can apply to use it!
The Matlab AI chat is a very good resource, but it should be kept seperate from MATLAB Answers, which is human assistance. There are some places where a google search now returns an incorrect AI answer that someone previously put as an Answer (not labeled as AI), and now other Chatbots repeat the incorrect but very confidently stated answer from MATLAB answers. AI hallucinations are an annoyance when they waste your time, but are far more damaging when they poision the well of knowledge by getting into 'primary' sources like Matlab Answers.
Hi Faisal. Good point on AI consumes the incorrect AI answers exist in MATLAB Answers. Currently, Answers forum allows content generated by AI, but it must be clearly indicated and verified. https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/content/community-guidelines.html
If the content is clearly AI-generated and incorrect, power users might flag or delete it at their discretion.
AI can hallucinate and provide completely wrong answers. I don't want it wasting my time. I would be happier with a concise AI answer along with a direct set of links to resources (documentation, forum questions, ...) it used to generate that response. That way I can verify the answer/solution it provides and dive deeper where I need.
Along with the comments about quality of the options themselves, this looks like it should be a multiple choice survey; the Answers and Questions sides are separate issue in my mind.
I strongly agree with the comment of it being extremely offputting to be bombarded with obvious AI content where unwanted; that would probably be the end of my participation unless were a way to turn it off in preferences.
It's a good idea to survey! Here are my comments on the various options (so far) :
- Provide insighful answers: depending on the subject or the way the question is phrased the answers can vary wildy, so probably not a great idea because it is unreliable.
- Provide label-AI answer: I understand that if a anwser is written by an AI it should be label as such. If that's the idea then it's a must.
- Provide anwer by both AI and human: too vague.
- Do not use AI for answers: yes/no, it's too vague.
- Give a button "chat with copilot": I have never used copilot so I cannot say. I mainly use chatGPT (free) and the code quality greatly depends on the task complexity and the size of the produced code.
- Use AI to draft better questions: AI as a writing assistant is nice both for questions and answers. If the final text is clearer or more complete then it's a win-win situation.
I will add that an additional option would be to resume the given answers. However, as we've all seen with Gemini the results can be completely off so a warning and a reliability score are a must.
I agree their choices are too vague so I did not vote. If they add any AI-generated help, it should be clearly labeled as such and kept separate from human-generated answers, as others have already commented. It should also be an option to not shown any AI-generated answers.
Interesting comments, Adrien! I haven't thought about a writing assistant for drafting answers. Could you elaborate how such an assistant would help answerers/contributors?
Hi Chen, I see two complementary solutions each acting on its own level (low and high).
There is the purely redacting help (punctuation, phrasing, etc) that others existings tools already provide (grammarly, scribens, etc).
Then you have the more complex help where the assistant could point out holes in the anwser, logic or propose links to related subjects.
This would require it to have a good understanding of the context and knowledge on both sides as to avoid an overload of details, a biais that chatGPT has.
To be honest I am not sure what form it should take (i.e. the directing prompt). If I had to make analogy it would be like asking an AI to rewrite a code to make it clearer and more complete. It would then rename the variables add comments and cover edge cases, they can be quite good at this, but in a more interactive way.
There is an equilibrium point to find between more human thinking and human accepting (the AI propositions). The later generally being strongly rejected by the public (i.e the AI do most of the work, steal content, etc).
This is a great survey. How about adding an option to use AI to draft better questions?
good idea!
I think providing a "chat with copilot" button would be a good option for people who have simpler questions to go to first. But I don't like having AI answers tossed at me in spaces where I expect human answers, I think if people wanted to ask AI they would ask AI I go to places like Reddit, Answers, Stack Exchange for responses and insight from other real life people
This poll is nice to see, thanks @cui,xingxing. The community team is exploring opportunities to leverage large language models in Answers and other areas of MATLAB Central.
I’m glad to hear this news. Additionally, regarding the MATLAB Help Document search functions, it’s related to AI, but currently relies on rule-based exact matching. Sometimes, if you enter a more/less character by mistake, you may encounter issues where the search returns no results.
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