Many bioinformatics programming tasks can be automated with ChatGPT

Understand

Computer programming is a fundamental tool for life scientists, allowing them to carry out many essential research tasks.

• However, despite a variety of educational efforts, learning to write code can be a challenging endeavor for both researchers and students in life science disciplines.
• Recent advances in artificial intelligence have made it possible to translate human-language prompts to functional code, raising questions about whether these technologies can aid (or replace) life scientists' efforts to write code.
• Using 184 programming exercises from an introductory-bioinformatics course, we evaluated the extent to which one such model -- OpenAI's ChatGPT -- can successfully complete basic- to moderate-level programming tasks.