Comment on Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions

• Nalivai@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  The problem is, it doesn’t improve text, it worsens it. And if your grasp of the language isn’t good enough, you can edit a page in your own language, or ask nerds in the discussion section to help you, it will be better written, they will be happy, and you might learn something.
  Asking a slop generator to generate some slop about what you wanted to write will make things worse.

  source

  • mirshafie@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    This is a bit alarmist I think. It’s about how you use it. If your prompt is “please write a funny story about a bunny” you’ll get slop. If you write a full-ass Wikipedia article and ask it to simplify and punctuate long passages for increased legibility you can get valuable feedback.

    source

    • Angrydeuce@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      It truly blows my mind that people need to use AI to write coherent sentences with proper punctuation at all. The shit that I receive in my inbox from people making far more money than me, that have multiple advanced degrees no less…it makes me weep for a future where no one is able to function without a computer holding their hand through the entire interaction.

      We’re going to get to the point where its all AIs talking to each other and humans are merely pressing the send button.

      source

      • mirshafie@europe.pub ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I do not agree with this at all. Some of the smartest people I know have severe dyslexia. And those are not just extremes, all of us exist on a spectrum where we have strengths and weaknesses, and not all of us can be literary geniuses.

        The fact that capitalism promotes mediocre bootlickers to positions of power has nothing to do with LLMs as a technology. Of course it will be exploited by these exact same people - all the more reason why we shouldn’t give them a monopoly on what’s genuinely a transformative technology.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
    • Nalivai@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      If you can wrote a full-ass Wikipedia article you don’t need slopogen to smoother it into a paste of an average. You already wrote a full-ass Wikipedia article, good, done. Nerds from all over the world will fix your wording if it’s appropriate, that’s why it’s collaborative, that’s what made it good.
      We all know it’s not how people use slopogen. People use it instead of thinking, instead of working, instead of writing. And if not banned completely, that’s what people will be doing with it, all the time, because people like to not spend any effort.

      source

      • mirshafie@europe.pub ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I find it really difficult to engage with this because it’s so obviously motivated by fear. And to be clear, there’s a lot to be afraid of with LLMs and generative AI, because the avenues for abuse are vast. However, the utility is also immense, and I really do find it an incredibly curiosity that to so many Lemmy users generative AI is just bad, as though it can’t really do anything properly.

        We live in an age where China spits out cute propaganda cartoons about the Iran war almost in real time, at a much faster pace than South Park in its prime, and you can’t be a little bit amazed? Where the fuck is your sense of wonder, man?

        And I get it, mediocre people use AI to do dumb shit and it’s infuriating, and evil corporations use it to compile kill lists, and if we let it take away our ability to write creatively, to compose new music, to write new code, then we atrophy perhaps the most important part of ourselves and we’ll live in a poorer world as a result. But that’s an us problem in the end, not a tech problem. If we want to avoid a future like that, we’ll have to accept the fact that LLMs are here to stay.

        source
  • teuniac_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I think it’s more nuanced than that. It all depends on what you’re asking it to do (and a bit of luck that it complies as intended). Using a thesaurus can also either improve or worsen a text.

    I’m not a native English speaker, but have lived in an English speaking country for many years now. I still make mistakes, but there is no point in me asking for help with English writing as my mistakes are subtle and I don’t realise I made them. Getting an AI to detect clumsy use of English and grammar mistakes has worked quite well for me before publishing reports. While I don’t always use the correct grammar while writing, I’m very capable of judging whether an LLM suggested improvement is actually better.

    Of course, letting an LLM rewrite a whole text is much riskier in terms of the original meaning getting lost. But that’s not the only way to use it.

    source

    • ThunderComplex@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      There’s definitely a lot of nuance in this topic. I think discarding the whole thing and saying “And if your grasp of the language isn’t good enough, you can edit a page in your own language” is a bit naïve. English is the lingua franca of the world, so if you have knowledge about something that should be in Wikipedia but isn’t, adding or appending to a English page will reach the widest audience. Ideally you’d then do the same for your native language as well.

      As long as there are humans at the beginning and end of the pipeline I at least hope that this won’t negatively affect the quality.

      source