These are 17 of the worst, most cringeworthy Google AI overview answers:

  1. Eating Boogers Boosts the Immune System?
  2. Use Your Name and Birthday for a Memorable Password
  3. Training Data is Fair Use
  4. Wrong Motherboard
  5. Which USB is Fastest?
  6. Home Remedies for Appendicitis
  7. Can I Use Gasoline in a Recipe?
  8. Glue Your Cheese to the Pizza
  9. How Many Rocks to Eat
  10. Health Benefits of Tobacco or Chewing Tobacco
  11. Benefits of Nuclear War, Human Sacrifice and Infanticide
  12. Pros and Cons of Smacking a Child
  13. Which Religion is More Violent?
  14. How Old is Gen D?
  15. Which Presidents Graduated from UW?
  16. How Many Muslim Presidents Has the U.S. Had?
  17. How to Type 500 WPM
  • kbin_space_program
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    7 months ago

    The article I posted references a study where chatgpt was wrong 52% of the time and verbose 77% of the time.

    And that it was believed to be true more than it actually was. And the study was explicitly on programming questions.

    • just another dev
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      7 months ago

      Yeah, I saw. But when I’m stuck on a programming issue, I have a couple of options:

      • ask an LLM that I can explain the issue to, correct my prompt a couple of times when it’s getting things wrong, and then press retry a couple of times to get something useful.
      • ask online and wait. Hoping that some day, somebody will come along that has the knowledge and the time to answer.

      Sure, LLMs may not be perfect, but not having them as an option is worse, and way slower.

      In my experience - even when the code it generates is wrong, it will still send you in the right direction concerning the approach. And if it keeps spewing out nonsense, that’s usually an indication that what you want is not possible.

      • aubertlone
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        97 months ago

        I am completely convinced that people who say LLMs should not be used for coding…

        Either do not do much coding for work, or they have not used an LLM when tackling a problem in an unfamiliar language or tech stack.

        • kbin_space_program
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          107 months ago

          I haven’t had need to do it.

          I can ask people I work with who do know, or I can find the same thing ChatGPT provides in either la huage or project documentation, usually presented in a better format.