this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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Wikipedia has a new initiative called WikiProject AI Cleanup. It is a task force of volunteers currently combing through Wikipedia articles, editing or removing false information that appears to have been posted by people using generative AI.

Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of the cleanup crew, told 404 Media that the crisis began when Wikipedia editors and users began seeing passages that were unmistakably written by a chatbot of some kind.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Sabotage Wikipedia, Ddos the Internet Archive. Makes you wonder if in the future we're going to forget our past. Will actual history be obscured in a sea of alternative histories unrecognizably presented as the same thing. Maybe we need to keep some books laying around in archives just to be sure.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

We have still Anna's archive, scihub, libgen and old fashion traditional libraries ( including the national ). National libraries won't disappear in the nearest years, maybe will rotten due to defunding but still they will exist

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

The digital dark age will be a real thing, absolutely.

Interesting idea on a sea of alternative histories. That might be a possible threat.
Someone else here called it "AI text apocalypse". I like that term.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Damn Putin, you're retarded.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

the name is Altman.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This is why we can’t have nice things

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

We still have it, and it's quite nice.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 days ago (3 children)

why the fuck would anyone stick ai shit on wikipedia that doesn't make any sense

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

The irony being a huge amount of the llm knowledge was based on WP in the first place, that and scientific papers.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 days ago (1 children)

"[The] main reasons that motivate editors to add AI-generated content: self-promotion, deliberate hoaxing, and being misinformed into thinking that the generated content is accurate and constructive," Lebleu said.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

so, stupidity basically. they're just stupid.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago

Many people who are trying to push lies have an agenda to undermine Wikipedia. Trump, Putin supporters, etc.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago

People suck

[–] [email protected] 30 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Download the torrent for the local copy of wikipedia from 2024 now

https://kiwix.org/

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 days ago

Or download it in a bunch of other ways directly from Wikipedia.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 6 days ago (2 children)

If anyone can survive the AI text apocalypse, it is wikipedia. They have been fending off and regulating article writing bots since someone coded up a US town article writer from the 2000 census (not the 2010 or 2020 census, the 2000 census. This bot was writing wikipedia articles in 2003)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

Well, for everything except fictional articles. Thats the hardest for them, historically

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Hopefully they tightened things up after the Scots incident.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

A considerable number of the articles written in Scots weren't written in Scots. The most prolific writer of the Scots articles was an American teen with no knowledge of Scots, and was more or less just writing them in a Scottish accent.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

Yep, I recalled that.

A certain amount of Russians with Cossack roots would do this with Ukrainian on the web, causing a bit less butthurt because TBH a lot of Ukrainians don't speak in any way proper Ukrainian, but a mix of Ukrainian and Russian, and a lot of the rest talk dialects still different from standard.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago
[–] [email protected] 69 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Unleashing generative AI on the world was basically the information equivalent of jumping headfirst into Kessler Syndrome.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 6 days ago (1 children)

For the uninitiated like me:

The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect,[1][2] collisional cascading, or ablation cascade), proposed by NASA scientists Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is numerous enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.

Wikipedia link.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Good call, thank you.

Also: Referencing Wikipedia in this context is kinda funny.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

I did think that. :) It's just.... So good. I hope it never enshitifies. God help us.

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