ChatGPT Temporarily Banned on Stack Overflow as Chatbot Was Giving Incorrect Answers

Stack Overflow, the coding and programming question-and-answer site has temporarily banned AI-powered ChatGPT chatbot. The site claims that the AI has been posting wrong answers and it could be “substantially harmful” to the site and its users. The number of correct answers created by ChatGPT is very low. And hence, it has been banned temporarily. ChatGPT is a chatbot that is designed to answer questions in a conversational way. These AIs can answer questions related to cooking recipes, coding tips, and more.

According to a post by Stack overflow, the ban is temporary and a final ruling would be made in the future after consultation with its community. It says that the ChatGPT produces a high rate of incorrect answers. However, the problem is that the answers seem to be good and correct, but on close examination, they appear incorrect.

The site wants to reduce the volume of these posts and hence, the use of ChatGPT to create posts is not permitted. The website has also stated to impose sanctions on users who might have used ChatGPT to create posts after this temporary ban has come into effect. It said, “If a user is believed to have used ChatGPT after this temporary policy is posted, sanctions will be imposed to prevent users from continuing to post such content, even if the posts would otherwise be acceptable.”

Several users seem to be happy with this decision and have taken to the comment section of Stack Overflow's post to share their views.

Meanwhile, San Francisco-based OpenAI made the ChatGPT chatbot available for free to the public for testing on November 30. And within a week, over a million users had tried to make the tool talk. It could be used in digital marketing, online content creation, answering customer service queries or even to help debug code.