Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Submission Preview

Link to Story

Stack Overflow Temporarily Bans Answers From OpenAI's ChatGPT Chatbot

Accepted submission by fliptop at 2022-12-12 15:58:31
Software

The Q&A site has been flooded with ChatGPT coding answers that look correct but often aren't, with moderators calling for a halt [zdnet.com]:

Stack Overflow, a site where developers can ask and answer coding questions, has temporarily banned the use of text generated from ChatGPT, a chatbot released by Open AI last week.

[...] Since launching, it's been prompted in numerous ways, including to write new code and fix coding errors, while the chatbot can ask for more context when a human asks it to resolve coding problems, as OpenAI sets out in examples [openai.com]. But Open AI also notes that ChatGPT sometimes writes "plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers."

This appears to be a key cause of its impact on Stack Overflow and its users who are seeking correct answers to coding problems. Additionally, because ChatGPT generates answers so quickly, some users are supplying lots of answers generated by it without parsing them for correctness.

[...] Stack Overflow says that ChatGPT answers have "swamped" its volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure because there are so many poor quality answers pouring in.

So far, Stack Overflow has detected posts generated by ChatGPT in the "thousands". The other problem is that many answers require a detailed analysis by someone with experience in the subject to determine if the answer is bad.

Previously:


Original Submission