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.
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.
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
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.
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
See also: model collapse
(Which is more or less just regression towards the mean with more steps)
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.)
AI model makers are very well aware of this and there is a move from ingesting everything to curating datasets more aggressively. Data prep ia something many upstarts have no idea is critical, but everyone is learning about, sometimes the hard way.
Eventually every article just reads “Delve delve delve delve delve delve delve.”
Every article would end up being the philosophy page.
I hate to post because I have loved and trusted Wikipedia for years, but the fact that there are folks out there who equally trust what AI tools generate just baffles me.
The signal to noise ratio is so low these days. There’s so much information out there but everyone wants to profit from you before you can get it. Even worse, the people with good information generally can’t buy as big a megaphone as the people who profit from lying to you.
Honestly, I think humans have been more likely to believe an easy lie than a hard truth all along, but it’s easier than ever these days.
Oh God. This is horrible news. So incredibly frustrating to hear.
Damn Putin, you’re retarded.
the name is Altman.
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
Lock it down make people get confirmed editing access face to face with trusted users.
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)
Hopefully they tightened things up after the Scots incident.
What Scots incident?
Ah. That.
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.
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.
Well, for everything except fictional articles. Thats the hardest for them, historically
Require someone that wants to add stuff to pay a small amount to the Wikimedia Foundation for activating their account and refund it if they moderate a certain amount.
Link it to your real identity, brilliant idea 👌
Yeah I mean I’ve had minor edits reversed because I didn’t source the fact properly
And that was like 10 years ago I’m surprised these edits are getting through in the first place
Seems like that would be an easy problem to solve… require all edits to have a peer review by someone with a minimum credibility before they go live. I can understand when Wikipedia was new, allowing anyone to post edits or new content helped them get going. But now? Why do they still allow any random person to post edits without a minimal amount of verification? Sure it self-corrects given enough time, but meanwhile what happens to all the people looking for factual information and finding trash?
Or at least give it a certain amount of time before it goes live. So if nobody comes around to approve it in 24 hours, it goes live.
Usually bad edits are corrected within hours, if not minutes, so that should catch the lion’s share w/o bogging down the approval queue too much.
Croudsourcing is the strenght that led to the vast resource and also the weakness as displayed here. So probably there will be a need for some form of barrier. Hence my suggestion.
This is why we can’t have nice things
We still have it, and it’s quite nice.
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.
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.
State actors could be interested in doing that. Same with the internet archive attacks.
People like this
Florida says hello. A bunch of other places too, sadly:-(.
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.
* looks around and gestures broadly in agreement*
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.
I never told that I think it is smart…
I suspect it would be difficult to generate enough data to intentionally change a dataset. There are certainly little holes, like the glue pizza thing, but finding and exploiting them would be difficult and noticing you and blocking you as a data source would be easy.
It’s not about on purpose but usually most people don’t care about what’s not in their interest. Today interests are usually quite shallow what tiktok shows quite well. Libraries do require money for operating. Even internet archive and wikipedia
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.
Edits can be reverted, articles can be locked.
Sure, but the vandalism has to be identified first. And that takes time and effort.
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.
Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as the title suggests. The attack on Internet Archive is far, far worse. It’s obviously a bit of a problem, though.We
We what? WE WHAT?!
oops
(I accidentally added an extra “we” to the end at first)
It’s over. We lost.
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:
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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.
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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.
And then #2 will be copied by other people and AIs, becoming seen as fact.
And then #2 will be copied by other people and AIs, becoming seen as fact.
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The vast majority of people think they’re the good guys…
Are we the baddies?
Without knowing you: probably.
Russian agriculture is in dire need of mechanization.
Well, I was in doubt, so I asked the AI whether I could trust the answers and it told me not to worry about it. That must mean that I only get accurate answers, right? /s
fights back by posting human-generated nonsense
