[…]will only take a few hallucinations before no one trusts LLMs to write code or give advice
Because none of us have ever blindly pasted some code we got off google and crossed our fingers ;-)
When you paste that code you do it in your private IDE, in a dev environment and you test it thoroughly before handing it off to the next person to test before it goes to production.
Hitting up ChatPPT for the answer to a question that you then vomit out in a meeting as if it’s knowledge is totally different.
It’s way easier to figure that out than check ChatGPT hallucinations. There’s usually someone saying why a response in SO is wrong, either in another response or a comment. You can filter most of the garbage right at that point, without having to put it in your codebase and discover that the hard way. You get none of that information with ChatGPT. The data spat out is not equivalent.
That’s an important point, and and it ties into the way ChatGPT and other LLMs take advantage of a flaw in the human brain:
Because it impersonates a human, people are more inherently willing to trust it. To think it’s “smart”. It’s dangerous how people who don’t know any better (and many people that do know better) will defer to it, consciously or unconsciously, as an authority and never second guess it.
And the fact it’s a one on one conversation, no comment sections, no one else looking at the responses to call them out as bullshit, the user just won’t second guess it.
Your thinking is extremely black and white. Many many, probably most actually, second guess chat bot responses.
