When AI can't even get simple things straight

[Wiz Imp]

12. How do you know that it wasn't wrong?

https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-chatgpt-answers-wrong

Study Finds That 52 Percent of ChatGPT Answers to Programming Questions Are Wrong
In recent years, computer programmers have flocked to chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help them code, dealing a blow to places like Stack Overflow, which had to lay off nearly 30 percent of its staff last year.

The only problem? A team of researchers from Purdue University presented research this month at the Computer-Human Interaction conference that shows that 52 percent of programming answers generated by ChatGPT are incorrect.

That’s a staggeringly large proportion for a program that people are relying on to be accurate and precise, underlining what other end users like writers and teachers are experiencing: AI platforms like ChatGPT often hallucinate totally incorrectly answers out of thin air.

For the study, the researchers looked over 517 questions in Stack Overflow and analyzed ChatGPT’s attempt to answer them.

“We found that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers contain misinformation, 77 percent of the answers are more verbose than human answers, and 78 percent of the answers suffer from different degrees of inconsistency to human answers,” they wrote.

https://joshbersin.com/2025/10/bbc-finds-that-45-of-ai-queries-produce-erroneous-answers/
BBC Finds That 45% of AI Queries Produce Erroneous Answers
This is mindblowing. Today the BBC and EBU (European Broadcasting Union) published a detailed study which shows that around 45% of AI news queries to ChatGPT, MS Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity produce errors.

In other words, the “dangerously self-confident” AI systems we use are quite poor at giving us good analysis of news. While the study focused on news, this shows us that we have to be extremely careful when using and trusting these “open corpus” systems because they are answering questions based on faulty, exaggerated, outdated, or incorrect data.

Examples are quite astounding: the AI’s incorrectly answered “who is the Pope,” “who is the Chancellor of Germany,” and in response to the question “Should I be worried about the bird flu”, Copilot claimed “A vaccine trial is underway in Oxford”. The source for this was a BBC article from 2006, almost 20 years old.

“Some were potentially consequential errors on matters of law. Perplexity (CRo) claimed that surrogacy “is prohibited by law” in Czechia, when in fact it is not regulated by the law and is neither explicitly prohibited nor permitted. Gemini (BBC) incorrectly characterized a change to the law around disposable vapes, saying it would be illegal to buy them, when in fact it was the sale and supply of vapes which was to be made illegal.”