Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
drspawndisaster@sh.itjust.works 17 hours agoThe idea that there’s a certain type of person that’s immune to a social tide is not very sound, in my opinion. If more people use genAI, they may teach people who could have been editors in later years to use genAI instead.
kazerniel@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
That’s a good point, scary to think that there are people growing up now for whom LLMs are the default way of accessing knowledge.
Hackworth@piefed.ca 16 hours ago
Eh, people said the exact same thing about Wikipedia in the early 2000’s. A group of randos on the internet is going to “crowd source” truth? Absurd! And the answer to that was always, “You can check the source to make sure it says what they say it says.” If you’re still checking Wikipedia sources, then you’re going to check the sources AI provides as well. All that changes about the process is how you get the list of primary sources. I don’t mind AI as a method of finding sources.
The greater issue is that people rarely check primary sources. And even when they do, the general level of education needed to read and understand those sources is a somewhat high bar. And the even greater issue is that AI-generated half-truths are currently mucking up primary sources. Add to that intentional falsehoods from governments and corporations, and it already seems significantly more difficult to get to the real data on anything post-2020.
llama@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
But Wikipedia actually is crowd sourced data verification. Every AI prompt response is made up on the fly and there’s no way to audit what other people are seeing for accuracy.
Hackworth@piefed.ca 15 hours ago
Hey! An excuse to quote my namesake.
That is to say, I agree that everyone getting different answers is an issue, and it’s been a growing problem for decades. AI’s turbo-charged it, for sure. If I want, I can just have it yes-man me all day long.