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

Stack Overflow, the platform known for coding and programming queries, has imposed a temporary ban on the AI-powered ChatGPT chatbot. The reason cited is the alleged posting of inaccurate answers, which is deemed potentially harmful to the site and its user community. The accuracy of responses generated by ChatGPT is reported to be notably low, leading to the temporary suspension. ChatGPT, designed for conversational question-answering, can address inquiries spanning cooking recipes to coding tips.

As outlined in a Stack Overflow post, the ban is declared as temporary, with a final decision pending after community consultation. The post emphasizes that ChatGPT consistently produces a high number of incorrect answers, with the challenge lying in the fact that the responses initially appear accurate but are found to be flawed upon closer inspection.

To mitigate the influx of such posts, the use of ChatGPT for content creation on the platform is currently prohibited. Stack Overflow has also announced its intention to penalize users who may have employed ChatGPT to generate posts during this temporary ban. The statement reads, “If a user is suspected of using ChatGPT after this temporary policy is in place, sanctions will be enforced to deter users from continuing to publish such content, even if the content would otherwise be considered acceptable.”

Numerous users have expressed approval of this decision in the comments section of Stack Overflow’s post. Meanwhile, OpenAI, headquartered in San Francisco, had made ChatGPT freely available to the public for testing on November 30. Within a week, the tool garnered over a million users who explored its applications in digital marketing, online content creation, customer service inquiries, and even code debugging.