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.”
Just playing devil’s advocate here, but if we could get to a future with algorithms so good they are essentially a talking version of all human knowledge, this would be a great thing for humanity.
That’s easy to say. Tell me how. Also tell me how to do it without it being biased about certain subjects over others. Captain Beatty would wildly disagree with this even being possible. His whole shtick in Fahrenheit 451 is that all the books disagreed with one another, so that’s why they started burning them.