Archive: archive.is/lP0lT
That is too bad. Wikipedia is important.
Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
Submitted 5 months ago by tonytins@pawb.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/
Comments
coffee_nutcase207@lemmy.world 5 months ago
r0ertel@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This will be unpopular, but hear me out. Maybe the decline in visitors is only a decline in the folks who are simply looking for a specific word or name and the forgot. Like, that one guy who believed in the survival of the fittest. Um. Let me try to remember. I think he had an epic beard. Ah! Darwin! I just needed a reminder, I didn’t want to read the entire article on him because I did that years ago.
Look at your own behaviors on lemmy. How often do you click/tap through to the complete article? What if it’s just a headline? What if it’s the whole article pasted into the body of the post? Click bait headlines are almost universally hated, but it’s a desperate attempt to drive traffic to the site. Sometimes all you need is the article synopsis. Soccer team A beats team B in overtime. Great, that’s all I need to know…unless I have a fantasy team.
Kissaki@feddit.org 5 months ago
If you don’t check their name - Darwin - on Wikipedia, where do you check it? A random AI? When you’re on Facebook, their AI? When you’re on Reddit, their AI? How trustworthy are they? What does that mean for general user behavior in the short and long term?
When you’re satisfied with a soccer match score from a headline, fair enough. Which headline do you refer to, though? Who provides it? Who ensures it is correct?
Wikipedia is an established and good source for many things.
The point is that people get their information elsewhere now. Where it may be incomplete, wrong, or maliciously misrepresenting or lying. Where discovering more related information is even further away. Instead of the next paragraph or a scroll or index nav list jump away, no hyperlink, no information.
Personally, I regularly explore and verify sources.
I doubt most visits to Wikipedia were as shallow as finding just one name or term.
r0ertel@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You have a lot of good points and I may have missed the intent of the article, but a knee jerk reaction of “lower traffic = AI is bad” is not helpful either. My point is that I frequently find myself hitting a page just to check a reference, quote or remember something. AI search results can be useful here. It’s no different than how DuckDugkGo has a sidebar if the results are from StackOverflow. It’s nice to get quick answers. I would like to see a fair solution to the content creators being able to stay in business.
Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
I think that you did not understand OC correctly…
What OC is talking about, is that the person searching for the lost word is verification enough. Meaning as soon as the word is seen, the remember is triggered to where the searching person knows the information already.
i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Half my visits to Wikipedia are because I need to copy and paste a Unicode character and that’s always the highest search result with a page I can easily copy and paste the exact character from.
Scrollone@feddit.it 5 months ago
Em dash? Wikipedia.
Nice-looking quotes? Wikipedia.
Accented uppercase letters? Wikipedia.
(Yeah, I know. The last one can only be understood by Italian speakers; or speakers of other languages with stupid keyboard layouts)
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Maybe the humans are going outside and the library?
Suffa@lemmy.wtf 5 months ago
Oh I hope not.
I do not want us to return to the days of people getting limited information from outdated books from a state ran facility.
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s called: playing in the real world.
It’s good for your health to be disconnected from the brain rot internet
fleebleneeble@reddthat.com 5 months ago
They would be better if they were funded better.
Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Oh I didn’t mean change the current setup. Create a standalone tool that better uses the wiki framework so people can access it in a different way, that’s all.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
If this AI stuff weren’t a bubble and the companies dumping billions into it were capable of any long term planning they’d call up wikipedia and say “how much do you need? we’ll write you a cheque”
They’re trying to figure out nefarious ways of getting data from people and wikipedia literally has people doing work to try to create high quality data for a relatively small amount of money that’s very valuable to these AI companies.
But nah, they’ll just shove AI into everything blow the equivalent of Wikipedia’s annual budget in a week on just electricity to shove unwanted AI slop into people’s faces.
nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
But nah, they’ll just shove AI into everything blow the equivalent of Wikipedia’s annual budget in a week on just electricity to shove unwanted AI slop into people’s faces.
You’re off my several order of magnitude unfortunately. Tech giants are spending the equivalent of the entire fucking Apollo program on various AI investments every year at this point.
Suffa@lemmy.wtf 5 months ago
Because they already ate through every piece of content on wikipedia years and years ago. They’re at the stage where they’ve trawled nearly the entire internet and are running out of content to find.
fishy@lemmy.today 5 months ago
So now the AI trawls other AI slop, so it’s essentially getting inbred. So they literally need you to subscribe to their AI slop so they can get new data directly from you because we’re still nowhere near AGI.
xylogx@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Every time someone visits Wikipedia they make exactly $0. In fact, it costs them money. Are people still contributing and/or donating? These seem like more important questions to me.
Octavio@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I think the theory is that the people who contribute and/or donate are a subset of the people who frequently visit. The smaller the superset, the smaller the subset is likely to be. I could be wrong; I’m not part of the subset that reads the articles.
possumparty@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
yeah, i drop a $20-25 donation yearly.
patatahooligan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
There are indirect benefits to visitors, though. Yes, most people are a drain on resources because they visit strictly to read and never to contribute. The minority that do contribute, though, are presumably people who used Wikipedia and liked it, or people who enjoy knowing that other people are benefiting from their contributions. I’m not sure people will donate or edit on Wikipedia if they believe no one is using it.
xylogx@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That makes sense. It is interesting to read the original blog post from Wikimedia:
diff.wikimedia.org/…/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia…
and what they say you can do if you want to help:
“Active volunteers can further help meet this moment by working with Wikimedia Foundation teams to test out new experiences and tools on Wikipedia. As the internet changes rapidly, this is a moment to consider what parts of Wikipedia should change (and what parts should not), while staying true to the promise of human-centered, free knowledge for the world.
A specific area where volunteers can help is with our new readers teams. We welcome you to review the current experiments we are running and help us answer key questions about what will most help readers. Please join the readers teams on their talk page and sign up for their newsletter to share your thoughts and learn more about their work. We’ll also be reaching out to communities soon with both live and on-wiki ways to talk about these trends, and what they mean for the Wikimedia projects.”
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’d make a cash donation right now if I could.
vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I got you fam. I’ve been making a decent monthly donation for years. Consider one of those on your behalf!
Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I sympathize with Wikipedia here because I really like the platform. That being said, modernize and get yourself a new front end. People don’t like AI because of it’s intrusiveness. They want convenience. Create “Knowledge-bot” or something similar that is focused on answering questions in a more meaningful way.
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
The last thing Wikipedia should do is change the look. Modernizing is a waste of resources when it works just fine all to just to give idiots a new dopamine hit.
Capitalism is the problem not wikipedia. Plus the reference desk exists, its just not instant.
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
FWIW:
Wikipedia:Reference desk
Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Interesting. I had never heard about this. Could still use a lot of sprucing up.
utopiah@lemmy.world 5 months ago
(pasting a Mastodon post I wrote few days ago on StackOverflow but IMHO applies to Wikipedia too)
“AI, as in the current LLM hype, is not just pointless but rather harmful epistemologically speaking.
It’s a big word so let me unpack the idea with 1 example :
- StackOverflow, or SO for shot.
So SO is cratering in popularity. Maybe it’s related to LLM craze, maybe not but in practice, less and less people is using SO.
SO is basically a software developer social network that goes like this :
- hey I have this problem, I tried this and it didn’t work, what can I do?
- well (sometimes condescendingly) it works like this so that worked for me and here is why
then people discuss via comments, answers, vote, etc until, hopefully the most appropriate (which does not mean “correct”) answer rises to the top.
The next person with the same, or similar enough, problem gets to try right away what might work.
SO is very efficient in that sense but sometimes the tone itself can be negative, even toxic.
Sometimes the person asking did not bother search much, sometimes they clearly have no grasp of the problem, so replies can be terse, if not worst.
Yet the content itself is often correct in the sense that it does solve the problem.
So SO in a way is the pinnacle of “technically right” yet being an ass about it.
Meanwhile what if you could get roughly the same mapping between a problem and its solution but in a nice, even sycophantic, matter?
Of course the switch will happen.
That’s nice, right?.. right?!
It is. For a bit.
It’s actually REALLY nice.
Until the “thing” you “discuss” with maybe KPI is keeping you engaged (as its owner get paid per interaction) regardless of how usable (let’s not even say true or correct) its answer is.
That’s a deep problem because that thing does not learn.
It has no learning capability. It’s not just “a bit slow” or “dumb” but rather it does not learn, at all.
It gets updated with a new dataset, fine tuned, etc… but there is no action that leads to invalidation of a hypothesis generated a novel one that then … setup a safe environment to test within (that’s basically what learning is).
So… you sit there until the LLM gets updated but… with that? Now that less and less people bother updating your source (namely SO) how is your “thing” going to lean, sorry to get updated, without new contributions?
Now if we step back not at the individual level but at the collective level we can see how short-termist the whole endeavor is.
Yes, it might help some, even a lot, of people to “vile code” sorry I mean “vibe code”, their way out of a problem, but if :
- they, the individual
- it, the model
- we, society, do not contribute back to the dataset to upgrade from…
well I guess we are going faster right now, for some, but overall we will inexorably slow down.
So yes epistemologically we are slowing down, if not worst.
Anyway, I’m back on SO, trying to actually understand a problem. Trying to actually learn from my “bad” situation and rather than randomly try the statistically most likely solution, genuinely understand WHY I got there in the first place.
I’ll share my answer back on SO hoping to help other.
Don’t just “use” a tool, think, genuinely, it’s not just fun, it’s also liberating.
Literally.
Don’t give away your autonomy for a quick fix, you’ll get stuck.”
originally on mastodon.pirateparty.be/…/115315866570543792
amzd@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Most importantly, the pipeline from finding a question on SO that you also have, to answering that question after doing some more research is now completely derailed because if you ask an AI a question and it doesn’t have a good answer you have no way to contribute your eventual solution to the problem.
ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
I honestly think that LLM will result in no progress made ever in computer science.
Most past inventions and improvements were made because of necessity of how sucky computers are and how unpleasant it is to work with them (we call it “abstraction layers”). And it was mostly done on company’s dime.
Now company will prefer to produce slop because it will hope to automate slop production.
I3lackshirts94@lemmy.world 5 months ago
As an expert in my engineering field I would agree. LLMs has been a great tool for my job in being better at technical writing or getting over the hump of coding something every now and then. That’s where I see the future for ChatGPT/AI LLMs; providing a tool that can help people broaden their skills.
There is no future for the expertise in fields and the depth of understanding that would be required to make progress in any field unless specifically trained and guided. I do not trust it with anything that is highly advanced or technical as I feel I start to teach it.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Maybe SO should run everyone’s answers through a LLM and revoke any points a person gets for a condescending answer even if accepted.
It can be very toxic there.
llama@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Yet I still have to go to the page for the episode lists of my favorite TV shows because every time I ask AI which ones to watch it starts making up episodes that either don’t exist or it gives me the wrong number.
Kissaki@feddit.org 5 months ago
Sounds like it wants you to ask about it and then wants to write fan fiction for you.
Scrollone@feddit.it 5 months ago
Let’s all repeat: LLMs don’t know any facts. They’re just a thesaurus on steroids.
RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don’t need more info than that summary, they don’t click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn’t be able to exist without the source material that it’s now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.
minorkeys@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s a layer of dependency and a barrier to entry. AI is not a servant to our interests but censor, preacher and teacher and cult speaker who works for psychopaths who would happily re-enslave the human race.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 5 months ago
AI will inevitably kill all the sources of actual information. Then all were going to be left with is the fuzzy learned version of information plus a heap of hallucinations.
What a time to be alive.
GaryGhost@lemmy.world 5 months ago
AI just cuts pastes from the websites like Wikipedia. The problem is when it gets information that’s old or from a sketchy source. Hopefully people will still know how to check sources, should probably be taught in schools. Who’s the author, how olds the article, is it a reputable website, is there a bias. I know I’m missing some pieces
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You replied to OP while somehow missing the entire point of what he said lol
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 5 months ago
Much of the time, AI paraphrases, because it is generating plausible sentences not quoting factual material. Rarely do I see direct quotes that don’t involve some form of editorialising or restating of information, but perhaps I’m just not asking those sorts of questions much.
veni_vedi_veni@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Man, we hardly did that shit 20 years ago. Ain’t no way the kids doing that now.
kazerniel@lemmy.world 5 months ago
“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”
I understand the donors aspect, but I don’t think anyone who is satisfied with AI slop would bother to improve wiki articles anyway.
drspawndisaster@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
The 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 5 months 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.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Not me. I value Wikipedia content over AI slop.
MystValkyrie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
I wonder if it’s just AI. I know some people moved to backing up older versions of Wikipida via Kiwix out of fear that the site gets censored.
tb_@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Search engines will still give Wikipedia results at the top for relevant searches. Heck, you can search Wikipedia itself directly!
Both Ecosia and DuckDuckGo support some form of “bangs”, if I tack
!wonto my search it’ll immediate go through to Wikipedia.
DuckDuckGo has even introduced an AI image filter, which is not perfect but still pretty good.MystValkyrie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Bangs are helpful, but my problem is that I previously used search engines to find informative articles and product suggestions beyond the scope of Wikipedia, and so much of that is AI slop now. And if it’s not that, Reddit shows up disproportionately in search results and Google is dominated by promoted posts.
Search engines used to be really good at connecting people to reliable resources, even if you didn’t have a specific website in mind, if you were good with keywords/boolean and had a discerning eye for reliable content, but now the slop-to-valuable-content ratio is too disproportionate. So you either need to have pre-memorized a list of good websites, rely on Chatbots, or take significantly longer wading through the muck.
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
all websites should block ai and bot traffic on principle.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Increasing numbers do.
But there is no proof that the LLM trawling bots are willing to respect those blocks.
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 5 months ago
FWIW:
Wikipedia:Bot policy#Bot requirements
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_policy#Bot_re…
RationalWiki:Bots
anticurrent@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I am kinda a big hater on AI and what danger it represents to the future of humanity
But. as a hobby programmer, I was surprised at how good these llms can answer very technical questions and provide conceptual insight and suggestions about how to glue different pieces of software together and which are the limitations of each one. I know that if AI knows about this stuff it must have been produced by a human. but considering the shitty state of the internet where copycat website are competing to outrank each other with garbage blocks of text that never answer what you are looking for. the honest blog post is instead burried at the 99 page in google search. I can’t see how old school search will win over.
Add to that I have found forums and platforms like stack overflow to be not always very helpful, I have many unanswered questions on stackoverflow piled-up over many years ago. things that llms can answer in details in just seconds without ever being annoyed at me or passing passive aggressive remarks.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
I know that if AI knows about this stuff it must have been produced by a human.
For now. Maybe.
It won’t be long before these LLMs will start ingesting the output from other LLMs, biases, hallucinations and all.
godrik@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Hobby programmer her as well. I know you I’ve spent a lot of time searching for solutions or hints for, especially when it’s about edge cases. So using AI as an alt. to a search engine have saved me sooo much time!
Another thing with the approach. I read somewhere that it require about 10 times as much energy to ask an AI instead of doing a web search and spending a little time looking through the result. So it’s something I try to think of to motivate myself with, to do as many usual web searches as possible, saving AI queries for when it matters more.
TangledHyphae@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I would say it’s more like 1000 times more energy. Trillions of matrix math computations for a handful of tokens at max speed and CPU/GPU usage, compared to a 10 millisecond database query (or in wiki’s case, probably mostly just easy direct edge node cache with no processing involved.)
Mrkawfee@feddit.uk 5 months ago
I asked a chatbot scenarios for AI wiping out humanity and the most believable one is where it makes humans so dependent and infantilized that we just eventually die out.
godrik@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Tbh, I’d say that’s not a bad scenario all in all, and much more preferably than scenarios with world war, epidemics, starvation etc.
Geodad@lemmy.world 5 months ago
So we get the Wall-e future…
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Mudd explains that he broke out of prison, stole a spaceship, crashed on this planet, and was taken in by the androids. He says they are accommodating, but refuse to let him go unless he provides them with other humans to serve and study. Mudd informs Kirk that he and his crew are to serve this purpose and can expect to spend the rest of their lives there.
RedWheelbarrow@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I guess I’m a bit old school, I still love Wikipedia.
AceOnTrack@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
I use Wikipedia when I want to know stuff. I use chatGPT when I need quick information about something that’s not necessarily super critical.
It’s also much better at looking up stuff than Google. Which is amazing, because it’s pretty bad. Google has become absolute garbage.
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yep, that an occasionally Wiktionary, Wikidata, and even Rationalwiki.
RedWheelbarrow@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You’re right bro but I feel comfortable searching the old fashioned way!
Cybersteel@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Same but with Encyclopedia Brittanica
frog_brawler@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’m surprised no-one has asked an LLM to produce a plausible version and just released that, claiming it’s a leak.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 5 months ago
because people are just reading AI summarized explanation of your searches, many of them are derived from blogs and they cant be verified from an official source.
BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Or the ai search just rips off Wikipedia.
DaMummy@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Why would people come? We live in an age where truth doesn’t matter.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
I’ve been meaning to donate to those guys.
I use their site frequently. I love it, and it can’t be cheap to keep that stuff online.
NoodlePoint@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I eat out and lately overhearing some people talking about how they find shit with ChatGPT, and it’s not a good sign.
balsoft@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
They stopped doing research as it used to be for about 30 years.
Was it really “like that” for any length of time? To me it seems like most people just believed whatever bullshit they saw on Facebook/Twitter/Insta/Reddit, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to have so many bots pushing political content there. Before the internet it would be reading some random book/magazine you found, and before then it was hearsay from a relative.
I think that the people who did the research will continue doing the research. It doesn’t matter if it’s thru a library, or a search engine, or Wikipedia sources, or AI sources, as long as you read the actual source you’ll be fine; if you didn’t want to do that it was always easy to stumble upon misinfo or disinfo anyways.
One actual problem that AI might cause is if the actual scientists doing the research start using it without due diligence. People are definitely using LLMs to help them write/structure the papers ¹ but if they actually use it to “help” with methodology or other content… Then we would indeed be in trouble, given how confidently incorrect LLM output can be.
NoodlePoint@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I think that the people who did the research will continue doing the research.
Yes, but that number is getting smaller. Where I live, most households rarely have a full bookshelf, and instead nearly every member of the family has a “smart” phone; they’ll grab the chance to use anything that would be easier than spending hours going through a lot of books. I do sincerely hope methods of doing good research are still continually being taught, including the ability to distinguish good information from bad.
Serinus@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Seems like clickbait. Wikipedia does not need actual visitors that badly.
chunes@lemmy.world 5 months ago
There’s a certain irony in a website that caused a decline in visitors to primary sources complaining about something new causing a decline in visitors to its tertiary sources
badbytes@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Wikipedia, is becoming one of few places I trust the information.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah switching search links will help but it’s a band-aid. AI has stolen literally everyone’s work without any attempt at consent or remuneration and the reason is now your search is 100 times faster, comes back with exactly something you can copy & paste and you never have to dig through links or bat away confirmation boxes to find out it doesn’t have what you need.
It’s straight up smash-n-grab. And it’s going to work. Just like everybody and their grandma gave up all their personal information to facebook so will your searches be done through AI.
The answer is to regulate the bejesus out of AI and ensure they haven’t stolen anything. That answer was rendered moot by electing trump.
Saltarello@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Alternative for DuckDuckGo:
miguel@fedia.io 5 months ago
In my case, I simply ended up buying a subscription to Brittanica, which I started using instead. I just don't trust wikipedia in this era.
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Surly it can’t be because of the decline in quality because of deposit admins defending their own personal fiefdoms.