Curse and Blessing of AI
AI is supposed to make life easier and help us get our work done faster and more easily. But is that really always the case, especially when we look at current topics in ABAP development?
Table of contents
In this article, we'll look at an example of how AI can change our learning behavior and the content we learn.
Introduction
This week, a colleague sent us an article and asked if our systems weren't up to date. He couldn't replicate some examples from one article on either S/4HANA 2023 or the SAP BTP ABAP Environment. We then took a closer look at the article and discovered additional topics.
Of course, this isn't meant to be a hater article that disparages AI. This article is only intended to point out potential dangers and to remind us, as developers, that in the future we need to consider which sources we trust and how we can sensibly classify such content.
Article
Let's take a closer look at the article in question. Should the article hopefully ever be taken offline, you'll find the PDF below as a backup so you can see the original. The article is about nested selects and subqueries. After the first section, we'll load associations, the common means for connecting the surrounding data in a Core Data Service. But if we look at the first example, experienced Core Data Service developers will be surprised by how strange this view looks.
Generally, this type of association doesn't work; it belongs in the header after the SELECT. A few lines later, we're greeted with subqueries in Core Data Service. Here, I wondered if my colleague was an internal employee and had previously leaked some information. But it looks more like a hallucination of CDS and ABAP SQL.
Further down, a Core Data Service, a CTE (Common Table Expression), and a Select are thrown together. Basically, when I read about it, this article looked very AI-like, so I immediately ran it through the AI checker and found 96% matches to the masterpieces of an LLM.
Blog
Perhaps there's an error in the article and everything else is okay? So we took a closer look at the blog and went through the various articles. Basically, the blog seems to be geared towards modern ABAP development. Cloud development with ABAP, and still modern, sounds very good at first.
After looking at the first few articles, we found a lot of nonsense and a lot of untruths about ABAP development. Here are a few highlights we came across:
- References - A page with references to blogs and resources worth checking out. I didn't know that abapGit had a blog, but unfortunately, I only get a 404. The link to the official LinkedIn group seems to only point to the general area. The formatting and listing are clearly AI.
- Date conversion - Converting a date to a timestamp? Very easy with a function module that doesn't exist or string concatenation to generate an invalid type.
- ABAP Editor - There seems to be a new editor specifically for the ABAP environment: "Advanced autocomplete is available in the cloud-based ABAP editor."
- Encryption - Things get worse when it comes to security; things are shown here that are more likely to be dangerous. The hard-wired encryptor does exist, but it's not a singleton, and the method doesn't exist either.
Basically, all of the content on the site seems to be garbage, and some truths from the LLM should be forgotten and this blog should be avoided. Basically, there doesn't seem to be any advertising on the blog yet, so the creator doesn't seem to be making any money from it for the time being, although this may still be planned.
More
If we do a little more searching, we find another blog by the same creator, this time in German. This seems to be about ABAP Cloud and modern development.
There is a linked GitHub profile, but it is completely empty and only creates a backlink to the blog. The same thing happens with an X account. So let's take a look at the list of blogs and articles; what kind of content do we find here? The list of blogs looks like SAP Help and explains every old term that was used long before ABAP Cloud. What's striking here is that it seems like all the blogs were created on April 6th by a diligent colleague who then didn't do anything else. Much of the content isn't completely off-topic, but it doesn't add much value either, and it's far from ABAP Cloud.
Author
Perhaps you can find more information about the actual developer? Basically, you can find a LinkedIn profile, VAT number, phone number, and other information; it looks okay at first glance. However, on the colleague's profile, we can't find a single ABAP or SAP skill:
Now the question arises: Why would someone create various blogs on the topic of ABAP development when they don't even have anything to do with development? To get traffic to the pages to advertise? Spreading false information?
Summary
Unfortunately, both blogs provide little added value. AI-generated content that's also incorrect, a kind of F1 help for classic ABAP, and, to top it off, an author who doesn't even know ABAP. Unfortunately, you can't report websites and mark them as spam or fake. The websites will continue to be visited by colleagues who, based on their design, believe that what is blogged there is correct.
Should the author ever read this blog, we would be happy if the pages were to disappear from the internet or be properly revised.
Conclusion
In general, you should steer clear of the content of the aforementioned blogs. Poorly created, unverified, and incorrect content won't help you do your work better or faster. Unfortunately, this content is now also being used to train next-generation AI, so it's no wonder the results aren't improving and the susceptibility to errors is increasing.
Source:
Blog article - ABAP CDS View Nested SELECT: Subqueries & Associations (Backup)
