Comment on Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 3 days agoA page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”
The intent was to make more uniform summaries, since some of them can still be inscrutable.
Relying on a tool notorious for making significant errors isn’t the right way to do it, but it’s a real issue being examined.
In thermochemistry, an exothermic reaction is a “reaction for which the overall standard enthalpy change ΔH⚬ is negative.”[1][2] Exothermic reactions usually release heat. The term is often confused with exergonic reaction, which IUPAC defines as “… a reaction for which the overall standard Gibbs energy change ΔG⚬ is negative.”[2] A strongly exothermic reaction will usually also be exergonic because ΔH⚬ makes a major contribution to ΔG⚬. Most of the spectacular chemical reactions that are demonstrated in classrooms are exothermic and exergonic. The opposite is an endothermic reaction, which usually takes up heat and is driven by an entropy increase in the system.
This is a perfectly accurate summary, but it’s not entirely clear and has room for improvement.
I’m guessing they were adding new summaries so that they could clearly label them and not remove the existing ones, not out of a desire to add even more summaries.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.
Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?
The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don’t have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Fundamentally, I agree with you.
The page being referenced
Because the phrase “Wikipedians discussed ways that AI…” Is ambiguous I tracked down the page being referenced. It could mean they gathered with the intent to discuss that topic, or they discussed it as a result of considering the problem.
The page gives me the impression that it’s not quite “we’re gonna use AI, figure it out”, but more that some people put together a presentation on how they felt AI could be used to address a broad problem, and then they workshopped more focused ways to use it towards that broad target.
It would have been better if they had started with an actual concrete problem, brainstormed solutions, and then gone with one that fit, but they were at least starting with a problem domain that they thought it was a applicable to.
Personally, the problems I’ve run into on Wikipedia are largely low traffic topics where the content is too much like someone copied a textbook into the page, or just awkward grammar and confusing sentences.
This article quickly makes it clear that someone didn’t write it in an encyclopedia style from scratch.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Somebody tried to build a bridge between both groups but they ran into the conundrum that to get to the other side they would first need to get half way to that side, then get half way of the remaining distance, then half way again the new remaining distance and so on an infinite number of times, and as the bridge was started from the science communicators side rather than the mathematicians side, they gave up.