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.”

  • otpEnglish
    190·
    5 months ago

    I’ve had lots of great experiences with ChatGPT, and I’ve also had it hallucinate things.

    I saw someone post an image of a simplified riddle, where ChatGPT tried to solve it as if it were the entire riddle, but it added extra restrictions and have a confusing response. I tried it for myself and got an even better answer.

    Prompt (no prior context except saying I have a riddle for it):

    A man and a goat are on one side of the river. They have a boat. How can they go across?

    Response:

    The man takes the goat across the river first, then he returns alone and takes the boat across again. Finally, he brings the goat’s friend, Mr. Cabbage, across the river.

    I wish I was witty enough to make this up.

    • capitalEnglish
      50·
      5 months ago

      I reproduced that one and so I believe that one is true.

      I looked up the whole riddle and see how it got confused.

      It happened on 3.5 but not 4.

      • otpEnglish
        30·
        5 months ago

        Interesting! What did 4 say?

        • capitalEnglish
          30·
          5 months ago

          Evidently I didn’t save the conversation but I went ahead and entered the exact prompt above into GPT-4. It responded with:

          The man can take the goat across the river in the boat. After reaching the other side, he can leave the goat and return alone to the starting side if needed. This solution assumes the boat is capable of carrying at least the man and the goat at the same time. If there are no further constraints like a need to transport additional items or animals, this straightforward approach should work just fine!

          • otpEnglish
            20·
            5 months ago

            Thanks for sharing!