Do AI assistants help students write formal specifications? A study with ChatGPT and the B-Method
This addresses the problem of teaching formal methods to students, but it is incremental as it extends AI assistant research to a new domain without major breakthroughs.
The study investigated whether ChatGPT helps undergraduate students write correct formal specifications using the B-method, finding that it does not improve correctness and that low trust in the AI correlates with better outcomes.
This paper investigates the role of AI assistants, specifically OpenAI's ChatGPT, in teaching formal methods (FM) to undergraduate students, using the B-method as a formal specification technique. While existing studies demonstrate the effectiveness of AI in coding tasks, no study reports on its impact on formal specifications. We examine whether ChatGPT provides an advantage when writing B-specifications and analyse student trust in its outputs. Our findings indicate that the AI does not help students to enhance the correctness of their specifications, with low trust correlating to better outcomes. Additionally, we identify a behavioural pattern with which to interact with ChatGPT which may influence the correctness of B-specifications.