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AI chatbots can boost scientific coding

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From Nature Ecology & Evolution

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Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, are ready to speed up monotonous coding tasks and teach you new skills. We highlight, with worked examples, some advantages and limitations of using generative artificial intelligence for scientific coding and argue that if you are willing to debug, you can get a head start on more challenging tasks.

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Fig. 1: An example query to ChatGPT for a short function, and the result.
Fig. 2: Uses of ChatGPT.

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Acknowledgements

C.M. and J.M.S.-D. were supported by NASA award 80NSSC 22K0883. C.M. and B.J.E. were supported by NSF awards 2225078 and 2225076. A.M.W. was supported by NASA awards 80NSSC21K1183 and 80NSSC21K0086. J.M.S.-D. acknowledges funding from ANR-21-CE32-0003

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Cory Merow & Josep M. Serra-Diaz

  2. Eversource Energy Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Cory Merow & Josep M. Serra-Diaz

  3. Université de Lorraine, AgroParisTech, INRAE, Silva, Nancy, France

    Josep M. Serra-Diaz

  4. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Brian J. Enquist

  5. Department of Geography, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Adam M. Wilson

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  1. Cory Merow
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  2. Josep M. Serra-Diaz
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  3. Brian J. Enquist
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  4. Adam M. Wilson
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Correspondence to Cory Merow.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary ChatGPT Examples 1-14

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Merow, C., Serra-Diaz, J.M., Enquist, B.J. et al. AI chatbots can boost scientific coding. Nat Ecol Evol 7, 960–962 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02063-3

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