StackOverflow: ChatGPT is banned

[darkoshi]

Temporary policy: ChatGPT is banned

"The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a large number of people are posting a lot of answers. The volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the answers often require a detailed read by someone with at least some subject matter expertise in order to determine that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure."

One reply is about the difficulty of determining which answers are from ChatGPT.
One reply suggests limiting how often a user can post answers, to at least reduce the flood of answers copied from ChatGPT.

The highest-voted reply, however, gives answers from ChatGPT about why StackOverflow should or should not allow AI-generated answers. :D

..

I tried out ChatGPT for myself the first time a couple weeks ago. I asked it how to add a Mouse Settings shortcut to the Windows 11 start menu, considering that it didn't have a "Pin to Start" option. ChatGPT suggested several reasonable-sounding methods which I hadn't found when I was searching for an answer, but unfortunately they didn't work for my scenario.

I was fairly impressed by the interaction, but it lends credence to the statement above, "while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good".

Comments

[frith]

The truthiness of alternate facts intensifies! (Oh come on! How is it that "truthiness" isn't flagged as not-a-word?!)

[darkoshi]

Javascript has a concept of truthy/falsy and truthiness/falsiness:
https://dev.to/mathlete/understanding-truthiness-by-comparing-it-to-falsiness-4177

There's also this meaning, which I hadn't been familiar with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness

The spell-checker must base it on the latter, as it flags falsiness as wrong.

[frith]

Thanks for the Wikipedia link, I did not know that "truthiness" was anything more than an ironic hipster word.

[redsixwing]

Good.

Yeah, the authoritative-looking garbage is a major problem.