What's the point of having AI-generated answers on Stackoverflow when I can just ask the AI to begin with ? There is no added value here, especially given that the AI is trained on SO data to begin with.
So the highly upvoted ai answer on SO would not be a hallucination.
And if I don't read through an answer, I'll also not upvote it.
This can be addressed in some cases with actual code verification. It’s how DeepSeek was trained. But it is hard in the general case.
I've tried many times to get an answer from these AI engines. They have always been just "good enough", to help me find a direction for more research to get a good answer, or flat out wrong.
Even with code - albeit most of my experience is with having it write AWS automation scripts in Python using the AWS SDK (Boto3), I’ll either give it the link to the API in question or tell it to “verify Boto3 calls on the web”.
The worse thing it usually does is have code where it wants you to include your credentials in code (don’t do that). But even most people on SO do the same
Google promotes AI slop above everything else, so may as well get in on the grift before it's too late.