Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia
drmoose@lemmy.world 5 days ago
AI threads on lemmy are always such a disappointment.
Its ironic that people put so little thought into understanding this and complain about “ai slop”. The slop was in your heads all along.
To think that more accessibility for a project that is all about sharing information with people to whom information is least accessible is a bad thing is just incredible lack of awareness.
The point is they should be fighting AI, not open the door even an inch to AI on their site. Like so many other endeavors, it only works because the contributors are human. Not corpos, not AI, not marketing. AI kills Wikipedia if they let that slip. Look at StackOverflow, look at Reddit, look at Google search, look at many corporate social media. Dead internet theory is all around us.
Wikipedia is trusted because it’s all human. No other reason
RAG is very good and accurate these days that doesn’t invent stuff.
In the OP I linked a comment showing how the summary presented in the showcase video is not actually very accurate and it definitely does invent some elements that are not present in the article that is being summarised.
And in general the “accessibility” that primarily seems to work by expressing things in imprecise, unscientific or emotionally charged terms could well be more harmful than less immediately accessible but accurate and unambiguous content. You appeal to Wikipedia being “a project that is all about sharing information with people to whom information is least accessible”, but I don’t think this ever was that much of a goal - otherwise the editors would have always worked harder on keeping the articles easily accessible and readable (in fact I’d say traditional encyclopedias are typically superior to Wikipedia with regards to accessibility in the sense of being comprehensible to laymen).
and would save millions of editor hours and allow more accuracy and complexity in the articles themselves.
Sorry but you’re making things up here, not even the developers of the summaries are promising such massive consequences. The summaries weren’t meant to replace any of the usual editing work, they weren’t meant to replace the normal introductory paragraphs or anything else. How would they save these supposed “millions of editor hours” then? In fact, they themselves would have to be managed by the editors as well, so all I see is a bit of additional work.
How dare you bring nuance, experience and moderation into the conversation.
Seriously, though, I am a firm believer that no tech is inherently bad, though the people who wield it might well be. It’s rare to see a good, responsible use of LLMs but I think this is one of them.
Whether technology is inherently bad is of nearly no matter. The problem we’re dealing with is the technologies with exherent badness.
I don’t think the idea itself is awful, but everyone is so fed up with AI bullshit that any attempt to integrate even an iota of it will be received very poorly, so I’m not sure it’s worth it.
I don’t think it’s everyone either - just a very vocal minority.
I don’t trust even the best modern commercial models to do this right, but with human oversight it could be valuable.
You’re right about it being a lost fight, in some ways at least. There are lawsuits in flight that could undermine it. How far that will go remains to be seen. Pissing and moaning about it won’t accelerate the progress of those lawsuits, and is mainly an empty recreational activity.
Don_alForno@feddit.org 5 days ago
I’ll make a note to get back to you about this in a few years when they start blocking people from correcting AI authored articles.