AI isn’t altering databases or knowledge. AI is telling the writer there’s a better way to do this, and the writer has to explicitly change their wording.
You only know to look at a dictionary for alternative wordings if you know there’s a problem. How do you know there’s a problem?
If you ask someone else what if that same someone else uses your regional dialect and not the one that has problems? Your average writer can review every single word used in the dictionary for every single article they edit. But AI can, and that’s something it’s actually good at. You may only know 5 Spanish speakers, but AI knows everything it was trained on.
Qwel@sopuli.xyz 18 hours ago
en.wikipedia.org/…/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_wit…
en.wikipedia.org/…/Wikipedia:LLM-assisted_transla…
The two related “policies” are rather short, you should read them if you haven’t.
The policy only allows usage as an auto-translater (a task at which they are not worst than old-style auto-translaters that were always allowed) and as spellcheck/grammarcheck (where it is also not worst than other allowed options).
None of those tools were previously seen as altering Wikipedia by themselves. The goal is that LLMs should be used and considered like they were.
To be clear they always were articles for creation submitted from clearly google-translated text, and they always were dismissed as slop. To get an autotranslated article accepted, you need to remove all the crap until all the information is correct and the grammar is good enough. This is a rather standard workflow for translations. The same thing should apply to LLMs.
The new issue here is that LLMs can “organically” change informations while asked to translate. When a classic autotranslate changes the information, it often (not always) leaves a notable mess in the grammar. LLMs will insert their errors much more cleanly. This is acknowledged by both texts and, well, texts will change if that becomes a reocurring issue.