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.
Further proof that humanity neither deserves nor is capable of having nice things.
Who would set up an AI bot to shit all over the one remaining useful thing on the Internet, and why?
I’m sure the answer is either ‘for the lulz’ or ‘late-stage capitalism’, but still: historically humans aren’t usually burning down libraries on purpose.
historically humans aren’t usually burning down libraries on purpose.
How on earth have you come to this conclusion.
To be fair, it’s usually to effect cultural genocide. It’s not average people burning libraries, it’s usually some kind of authoritarian regime.
historically humans aren’t usually burning down libraries on purpose.
Sometimes they are, Baghdad springs to mind, I’m sure there are other examples. And this library is online so there’s less chance of getting caught with a can of petrol and a box of matches.
Then there’s every authoritarian regime that tries to ban or burn specific types of books. What we’re seeing here could be more like that - an attempt to muddy the waters or introduce misinformation on certain topics.
Because basement losers can’t conquer and raze libraries to the ground.
The internet has shown that assumed anonymity result in people fucking with other people’s lives for the hell of it. Viruses, trolling, etc. This is just the next stage of it because of a new easy to use tool.
Yeah but the other thing about humanity is it’s mostly harmless. Edits can be reverted, articles can be locked. Wikipedia will be fine.
Wikipedia relies on sources, and humans choosing the sources like newspapers. And those newspapers are more and more inside a “bubble” that rejects any evidence or reporting presented by a competing bubble.
Right now wikipedia is covering up one of the greatest acts of mass murder of our times, because the newspapers are covering it up, or rejecting evidence because it’s by the “enemy”. Part of this is a defensive posture against AI bots and enemy disinformation.
Maybe a strange way of activism that is trying to poison new AI models 🤔
Which would not work, since all tech giants have already archived preAI internet
Ah, so the AI version of the chewbacca defense.
I have to wonder if intentionally shitting on LLMs with plausible nonsense is effective.
Like, you watch for certain user agents and change what data you actually send the bot vs what a real human might see.
Its because there’s no accountability for cybercrimes. If humans always had a button to burn down libraries, I’m sure they would have. Instead they had to put themselves in harms way to do such things.
People do things cause they can, and fucking with Wikipedia is apparently simple.
As for why this is happening, the cleanup crew thinks there are three primary reasons.
“[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,”
That last one. Ouch.
“[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,”
I think the main driver behind people misinformed about AI content comes from the fact that outside of tech people, most have no idea that AI will:
-
100% make up answers to things it doesn’t know because either the sample size of data they have ingested was to small or was bad. And it will do this with the same robot confidence you get for any other answer.
-
AI that has been fed to much other AI generated content will begin to “hallucinate” and give some wild outputs, very similar to humans suffering from schizophrenia. And again these answers will be given as “fact” with the same robotic confidence.
Unleashing generative AI on the world was basically the information equivalent of jumping headfirst into Kessler Syndrome.
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.
Good call, thank you.
Also: Referencing Wikipedia in this context is kinda funny.
Best case is that the model used to generate this content was originally trained by data from Wikipedia so it “just” generates a worse, hallucinated “variant” of the original information. Goes to show how stupid this idea is.
Imagine this in a loop: AI trained by Wikipedia that then alters content on Wikipedia, which in turn gets picked up by the next model trained. It would just get worse and worse, similar to how converting the same video over and over again yields continuously worse results.
Yes, this is what many of us worry will become the internet in general. AI content generated on from AI trained on AI garbage.
AI bots can trivially outpace humans.
I was just discussing with a friend of mine how we’re rapidly approaching the dead internet. At some point, many websites will likely just be chat bots talking to other chat bots, which then gets used to train further chat bots. Human made content is already becoming harder and harder to find on algorithm heavy websites like Reddit and facebooks suite of sites. The bots can easily outpace any algorithmic changes they might make to help deter them, but my fb using family members all constantly block those weird Jesus accounts and they still show up constantly
A very similar situation to that analysed in this paper that was recently published. The quality of what is generated degrades significantly.
Although they mostly investigate replacing the data with ai generated data in each step, so I doubt the effect will be as pronounced in practice. Human writing will still be included and even curation of ai generated text by people can skew the distribution of the training data (as the process by these editors would inevitably do, as reasonable text could get through the cracks.)
Jesus Christ. The amount of absolute bellends in the world never ceases to confound me.
They used to be contained, every village has their idiot. Now that the internet is the global village, all the formerly isolated idiots have a place to chat.
Amazing how these idiots are this effective…
While us common folk can’t organize or agree on anything
Most of us do something idiotic once and when the opportunity to do it again, pull back and think "this was embarrassing last time, maybe I’ll re-evaluate. "
But a dedicated idiotic is a different beast, fill of confidence and have had what ever organ produces shame surgically removed enabling them to commit ever greater acts of idiocy. But then the internet was invented and these people met. Some even had babies. And now there is arms race to see how many idiots can squeeze through the same tiny door. They have recognised their time to shine and seized it with their clammy yet also sticky hands.
Truly, it’s inspiring in its own special way
