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.”

  • capitalEnglish
    11•1 month 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.worksEnglish
      4•1 month 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