To make matters worse, programmers in the study would often overlook the misinformation.

The research from Purdue University, first spotted by news outlet Futurism, was presented earlier this month at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Hawaii and looked at 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow that were then fed to ChatGPT.

“Our analysis shows that 52% of ChatGPT answers contain incorrect information and 77% are verbose,” the new study explained. “Nonetheless, our user study participants still preferred ChatGPT answers 35% of the time due to their comprehensiveness and well-articulated language style.”

Disturbingly, programmers in the study didn’t always catch the mistakes being produced by the AI chatbot.

“However, they also overlooked the misinformation in the ChatGPT answers 39% of the time,” according to the study. “This implies the need to counter misinformation in ChatGPT answers to programming questions and raise awareness of the risks associated with seemingly correct answers.”

  • @yoplaEnglish
    2•1 month ago

    APIs that don’t exist

    I had that. I got a bunch of ok code for an AWS API, but then it decided to hallucinate a method. I tried all kind of prompt to instruct it that the method didn’t exist and not to use it, but it always came back telling me it was the right way to do it.

    Anyway, still faster than reading the doc for a one off script I just wanted thrown together quickly and never to be reused again.