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.”

  • @[email protected]English
    7•7 months ago

    I’m honestly a bit jealous of you. You are going to be so amazed when you realise this stuff is just barely getting started. It’s insane what people are already building with agents. Once this stuff gets mainstream, and specialized hardware hits the market, our current paradigm is going to seem like silent black and white films compared to what will be going on. By 2030 we will feel like 2020 was half a century ago at least.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•7 months ago

      Looking forward to it, but won’t be disappointed if it takes a bit longer than expected.

      • @[email protected]English
        3•7 months ago

        Ray Kurzweil has a phenomenal record of making predictions. He’s like 90% or something and has been saying AGI by 2029 for something like 30+ years. Last I heard, he is sticking with it, but he admits he may be a year or two off in either direction. AGI is a pretty broad term, but if you take it as “better than nearly every human in every field of expertise,” then I think 2029 is quite reasonable.

        • @[email protected]English
          4•7 months ago

          That’s not very far in the future, so it’s going to be really exciting to see how that works out.

          • @[email protected]English
            3•7 months ago

            Maybe only 51% of the code it writes needs to be good before it can self-improve. In which case, we’re nearly there!

            • @[email protected]English
              3•7 months ago

              We are already past that. The 48% is from a version of chatgpt(3.5) that came out a year ago, there has been lots of progress since then.