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Wikipedia is under assault: rogue users keep posting AI generated nonsense (www.techspot.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Wikipedia has a new initiative called WikiProject AI Cleanup. It is a task force of volunteers currently combing through Wikipedia articles, editing or removing false information that appears to have been posted by people using generative AI.

Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of the cleanup crew, told 404 Media that the crisis began when Wikipedia editors and users began seeing passages that were unmistakably written by a chatbot of some kind.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 4 weeks ago (8 children)

As for why this is happening, the cleanup crew thinks there are three primary reasons.

"[The] main reasons that motivate editors to add AI-generated content: self-promotion, deliberate hoaxing, and being misinformed into thinking that the generated content is accurate and constructive,"

That last one. Ouch.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

“[The] main reasons that motivate editors to add AI-generated content: self-promotion, deliberate hoaxing, and being misinformed into thinking that the generated content is accurate and constructive,”

I think the main driver behind people misinformed about AI content comes from the fact that outside of tech people, most have no idea that AI will:

100% make up answers to things it doesn't know because either the sample size of data they have ingested was to small or was bad. And it will do this with the same robot confidence you get for any other answer.
AI that has been fed to much other AI generated content will begin to "hallucinate" and give some wild outputs, very similar to humans suffering from schizophrenia. And again these answers will be given as "fact" with the same robotic confidence.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

And then #2 will be copied by other people and AIs, becoming seen as fact.

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