Can artificial intelligence replace humans in programming?

Sammanfattning: The recent developments in artificial intelligence have brought forth natural language models like ChatGPT, which exhibits abilities in tasks such as language translation, text generation, and interacting conversations. Notably, ChatGPT's ability to generate code has sparked debates regarding the role of artificial intelligence in software engineering and its potential to replace human programmers.  In this thesis, we conduct an experiment in which we prompt ChatGPT with common programming problems, in order to evaluate ChatGPT’s potential in replacing humans as programmers. Our study specifically focuses on code correctness, run-time performance, and memory usage. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the potential of ChatGPT in replacing humans as programmers. We achieved this by designing and conducting an experiment where we prompted ChatGPT with a set of 90 diverse programming problems in terms of types and difficulty levels.  Based on the results of our experiment, we have observed that ChatGPT is proficient in solving programming problems at lower and medium difficulty levels. However, its ability to produce correct code declines when prompted with harder problems. In terms of run-time and memory usage, ChatGPT demonstrated above-average results for problems at lower and medium difficulty levels, but its performance declined when faced with more challenging tasks.While ChatGPT falls shortly in fully replacing human programmers, it exhibits potential as programming assistant. Our study shed light onto current capabilities of ChatGPT and others chat-bots as code generating tools and can serve as a groundwork for future work in the area.