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.”

  • zelifcam@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    “Major new Technology still in Infancy Needs Improvements”

    – headline every fucking day

    • aname@lemmy.one
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      6 months ago

      “Corporation using immature technology in productions because it’s cool”

      More news at eleven

      • capital@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        This is scary because up to now, all software released worked exactly as intended so we need to be extra special careful here.

        • otp@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          Yes, and we never have and never will put lives in the hands of software developers before!

          Tap for spoiler

          /s…for this comment and the above one, for anyone who needs it

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      unready technology that spews dangerous misinformation in the most convincing way possible is being massively promoted

      • AIhasUse@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Yeah, because no human would convincingly lie on the internet. Right, Arthur?

        It’s literally built on what confidently incorrect people put on the internet. The only difference is that there are constant disclaimers on it saying it may give incorrect information.

        Anyone too stupid to understand how to use it is too stupid to use the internet safely anyways. Or even books for that matter.

        • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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          6 months ago

          Holy mother of false equivalence. Google is not supposed to be a random dude on the Internet, it’s supposed to be a reference tool, and for the most part it was a good one before they started enshittifying it.

          • AIhasUse@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Google is a search engine. It points you to web pages that are made by people. Many times, the people who make those websites have put things on them that are knowingly or unknowingly incorrect but said in an authoritative manner. That was all I was saying, nothing controversial. That’s been a known fact for a long time. You can’t just read something on a single site and then be sure that it has to be true. I get that there are people who strangely fall in love with specific websites and think they are absolute truth, but thats always been a foolish way to use the internet.

            A great example of people believing blindly is all these horribly doctored google ai images saying ridiculous things. There are so many idiots that think every time they see a screenshot of Google ai saying something absurd that it has to be true. People have even gone so far as to use ridiculous fonts just to point out how easy it is to get people to trust anything. Now there’s a bunch of idiots that think all 20 or so Google ai mistakes they’ve seen are all genuine, so much so that they think almost all Google ai responses are incorrect. Some people are very stupid. Sorry to break it to you, but LLMs are not the first thing to put incorrect information on the internet.

      • AIhasUse@lemmy.world
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        6 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.

          • AIhasUse@lemmy.world
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            6 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.

              • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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                6 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!

                • AIhasUse@lemmy.world
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                  6 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.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      6 months ago

      in Infancy Needs Improvements

      I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say that if we have to invest in new energy sources just to make these tools functionably usable… maybe we’re better off just paying people to do these jobs instead of burning the planet to a rocky dead husk to achieve AI?

      • Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

        • btaf45@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          they are essentially a talking version of all human knowledge

          “Obama is a Muslim”

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 months ago

          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.

          • Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            There’s this series of books called the www series, about AI before AI was the new hot thing every company needed to mention at least once to get stock price to go up.

            Tap for spoiler

            Essentially an AI popped up on the internet, which was able to read everything. Due to this it was able to combine data in such a way that it found things like a cure for cancer by combining research papers that no one had ever combined. This is a very bad explanation, but I could see how this makes sense.

            Spoiler free explanation: no human has read everything, I think there could be big implications if there’s an AI that has that can see connections that no one ever has.

          • Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            But let’s say some company did it, a perfect AI that has read everything and doesn’t hallucinate.

            A researcher is working on some experiments, if they could just route it through the AI, and it would annalyse if that experiment was even possible, maybe already done, this could speed up research.

            With a truly perfect model, which the tech bros are aiming for, I can see the potential for good. I ofcourse am skeptical such a model is possible, but… I kinda see why it would be nice to have.