According to mods on Stack Overflow, the ban was put in place because ChatGPT makes it too easy for users to generate AI responses and essentially spam the site with responses. Many of these answers look helpful but end up being incorrect. Mods say the ban is currently temporary but a final ruling will eventually be made about the ongoing support of OpenAI’s chatbot: “The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce,” claim the mods. “As such, we need the volume of these posts to reduce […] So, for now, the use of ChatGPT to create posts here on Stack Overflow is not permitted. 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.”
ChatGPT
If you are unfamiliar with ChatGPT, is an OpenAI project that is based on the group’s autocomplete text generator GPT-3. A demo was initially released last week and has already become popular online. If you’re interested in checking it out, you can do so at OpenAI here (log in required). The main ability of the app is being able to return impressively accurate answers, including the ability to generate creative content such as songs and poems. It can also answer trvia questions and help by debugging code. Despite being an interesting model, many people have found ChatGPT often returns answers that look correct but are in fact wrong. A good old-fashioned coherent bullshitter it seems. Tip of the day: With a single registry tweak, it’s possible to add a ‘Take Ownership’ button to the right-click context menu that performs all of the necessary actions for you. You’ll gain full access to all possible actions, including deletion, renaming, and more. All files and subfolders will also be under your name. The Take Ownership context menu will set the currently active user as the owner of the files, though they must also be an administrator. They can then enter the folder or modify the file as they usually would.
