Wikipedia is using (some) generative AI now

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/659222/wikipedia-generative-ai

1 4 1 year ago

jjmarr• 1 year ago

There's a ton of boring and rote maintenance tasks on the English Wikipedia that are too complicated for a bot but are simple enough for regex to mostly be accurate. Stuff like fixing spelling errors, links to article names, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser

Right now the tool (AutoWikiBrowser, linked above) is slow, old, Windows-only, and tough to maintain. AI will easily replace this. Heck, I'm already using it to generate the regex rules.

mubou2• 1 year ago

Automating tasks is exactly what AI/ML should be used for. My concern is that they're going to be using LLMs to "translate" other-language articles into English and vice versa. LLMs are horrendously bad at this, compared to models trained specifically for translation tasks. They make shit up, invent phrases that weren't in the source text, etc., and with how much blind faith people put in ChatGPT, you can be sure a lot of those hallucinations will go unchecked.

The funny part is, Wikipedia is the #1 data set used for all sorts of machine learning training (not just LLMs). I hope they at least mark articles that were translated/edited by AI, because otherwise the AI machine is gonna start feeding back into itself sooner or later.

layer8• 1 year ago

Automation is exactly what current-day generative AI should not be used for, because it lacks reliability and reproducibility.

I agree that it shouldn’t be used to translate Wikipedia pages without thorough review either.

Wikipedia is using (some) generative AI now

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