this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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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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[–] YeetPics@mander.xyz 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Damn Putin, you're retarded.

the name is Altman.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.world 19 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

why the fuck would anyone stick ai shit on wikipedia that doesn't make any sense

[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 15 points 6 hours ago (1 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," Lebleu said.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

so, stupidity basically. they're just stupid.

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 2 points 1 hour ago

Many people who are trying to push lies have an agenda to undermine Wikipedia. Trump, Putin supporters, etc.

[–] MellowSnow@lemmy.world 10 points 6 hours ago

People suck

[–] WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world 10 points 6 hours ago

This is why we can’t have nice things

[–] xnx@slrpnk.net 22 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Download the torrent for the local copy of wikipedia from 2024 now

https://kiwix.org/

[–] varjen@lemmy.world 7 points 3 hours ago

Or download it in a bunch of other ways directly from Wikipedia.

[–] randon31415@lemmy.world 34 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

If anyone can survive the AI text apocalypse, it is wikipedia. They have been fending off and regulating article writing bots since someone coded up a US town article writer from the 2000 census (not the 2010 or 2020 census, the 2000 census. This bot was writing wikipedia articles in 2003)

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 3 points 6 hours ago

Well, for everything except fictional articles. Thats the hardest for them, historically

[–] T156@lemmy.world 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Hopefully they tightened things up after the Scots incident.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (2 children)
[–] T156@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

A considerable number of the articles written in Scots weren't written in Scots. The most prolific writer of the Scots articles was an American teen with no knowledge of Scots, and was more or less just writing them in a Scottish accent.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago
[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 57 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Unleashing generative AI on the world was basically the information equivalent of jumping headfirst into Kessler Syndrome.

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 32 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

For the uninitiated like me:

The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect,[1][2] collisional cascading, or ablation cascade), proposed by NASA scientists Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is numerous enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.

Wikipedia link.

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 15 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Good call, thank you.

Also: Referencing Wikipedia in this context is kinda funny.

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 7 points 10 hours ago

I did think that. :) It's just.... So good. I hope it never enshitifies. God help us.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 217 points 20 hours ago (13 children)

Further proof that humanity neither deserves nor is capable of having nice things.

Who would set up an AI bot to shit all over the one remaining useful thing on the Internet, and why?

I'm sure the answer is either 'for the lulz' or 'late-stage capitalism', but still: historically humans aren't usually burning down libraries on purpose.

historically humans aren't usually burning down libraries on purpose.

Sometimes they are, Baghdad springs to mind, I'm sure there are other examples. And this library is online so there's less chance of getting caught with a can of petrol and a box of matches.

Then there's every authoritarian regime that tries to ban or burn specific types of books. What we're seeing here could be more like that - an attempt to muddy the waters or introduce misinformation on certain topics.

[–] Schmoo@slrpnk.net 86 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

historically humans aren't usually burning down libraries on purpose.

How on earth have you come to this conclusion.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 29 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

To be fair, it's usually to effect cultural genocide. It's not average people burning libraries, it's usually some kind of authoritarian regime.

[–] SacralPlexus@lemmy.world 25 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

* looks around and gestures broadly in agreement*

[–] poszod@lemmy.world 105 points 19 hours ago

State actors could be interested in doing that. Same with the internet archive attacks.

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 4 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Yeah but the other thing about humanity is it's mostly harmless. Edits can be reverted, articles can be locked. Wikipedia will be fine.

[–] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 8 points 7 hours ago

Edits can be reverted, articles can be locked.

Sure, but the vandalism has to be identified first. And thar takes time and effort.

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[–] Wrench@lemmy.world 9 points 16 hours ago

Because basement losers can't conquer and raze libraries to the ground.

The internet has shown that assumed anonymity result in people fucking with other people's lives for the hell of it. Viruses, trolling, etc. This is just the next stage of it because of a new easy to use tool.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 16 points 19 hours ago

Florida says hello. A bunch of other places too, sadly:-(.

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[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 106 points 19 hours ago (3 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.

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 30 points 18 hours ago

“[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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 45 points 19 hours ago

The vast majority of people think they're the good guys...

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[–] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 50 points 18 hours ago (5 children)

Best case is that the model used to generate this content was originally trained by data from Wikipedia so it "just" generates a worse, hallucinated "variant" of the original information. Goes to show how stupid this idea is.

Imagine this in a loop: AI trained by Wikipedia that then alters content on Wikipedia, which in turn gets picked up by the next model trained. It would just get worse and worse, similar to how converting the same video over and over again yields continuously worse results.

[–] huginn@feddit.it 22 points 15 hours ago

See also: model collapse

(Which is more or less just regression towards the mean with more steps)

[–] Wrench@lemmy.world 13 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, this is what many of us worry will become the internet in general. AI content generated on from AI trained on AI garbage.

AI bots can trivially outpace humans.

[–] kboy101222@sh.itjust.works 8 points 15 hours ago

I was just discussing with a friend of mine how we're rapidly approaching the dead internet. At some point, many websites will likely just be chat bots talking to other chat bots, which then gets used to train further chat bots. Human made content is already becoming harder and harder to find on algorithm heavy websites like Reddit and facebooks suite of sites. The bots can easily outpace any algorithmic changes they might make to help deter them, but my fb using family members all constantly block those weird Jesus accounts and they still show up constantly

[–] 8uurg@lemmy.world 5 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

A very similar situation to that analysed in this paper that was recently published. The quality of what is generated degrades significantly.

Although they mostly investigate replacing the data with ai generated data in each step, so I doubt the effect will be as pronounced in practice. Human writing will still be included and even curation of ai generated text by people can skew the distribution of the training data (as the process by these editors would inevitably do, as reasonable text could get through the cracks.)

[–] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

AI model makers are very well aware of this and there is a move from ingesting everything to curating datasets more aggressively. Data prep ia something many upstarts have no idea is critical, but everyone is learning about, sometimes the hard way.

Eventually every article just reads "Delve delve delve delve delve delve delve."

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[–] lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone 36 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I hate to post because I have loved and trusted Wikipedia for years, but the fact that there are folks out there who equally trust what AI tools generate just baffles me.

[–] Dragonstaff@leminal.space 8 points 14 hours ago

The signal to noise ratio is so low these days. There's so much information out there but everyone wants to profit from you before you can get it. Even worse, the people with good information generally can't buy as big a megaphone as the people who profit from lying to you.

Honestly, I think humans have been more likely to believe an easy lie than a hard truth all along, but it's easier than ever these days.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 42 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Jesus Christ. The amount of absolute bellends in the world never ceases to confound me.

[–] Bahnd@lemmy.world 32 points 19 hours ago

They used to be contained, every village has their idiot. Now that the internet is the global village, all the formerly isolated idiots have a place to chat.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 25 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Don't worry, it's not as bad as the title suggests. The attack on Internet Archive is far, far worse. It's obviously a bit of a problem, though.

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[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 19 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

fights back by posting human-generated nonsense

[–] fishbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 10 hours ago

StarshipTroopers-ImDoingMyPart.tar.gz

[–] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 11 points 18 hours ago (6 children)

AI is the buggest pile of dogshit to come out of tech in the history of the human race

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