Stack Overflow temporarily bans answers from OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot

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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. 

ChatGPT is based on OpenAI's GPT-3 language model. People have quickly discovered that, while it answers prompts in a "human-adjacent" way, there can be flaws in the answers it gives.

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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. But Open AI also notes that ChatGPT sometimes writes "plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers."  

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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. 

"The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look likethey mightbe good and the answers are veryeasy to produce," says Stack Overflow moderators in a post.  

Some developers believe ChatGPT's impact on Stack Overflow was an obvious problem because it would allow users to game its reputation system. 

“People posting GPT answers to stackoverflow to scoop the points without knowing if the answer is actually correct” is one of those problems that’s too obvious to even foresee https://t.co/eDfa2zu9Wt

— badidea 🪐 (@0xabad1dea) December 5, 2022

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. 

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As of the temporary policy, if any human users are caught posting answers generated by ChatGPT, Stack Overflow will impose "sanctions" on the user, even if the post was acceptable. 

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