(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 https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/115315866570543792
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 companies will prefer to produce slop (even more) because it will hope to automate slop production.
Maybe SO should run everyone’s answers through a LLM and revoke any points a person gets for a condescending answer even if accepted.
Give a warning and suggestions to better meet community guidelines.
It can be very toxic there.
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.
I’d make a cash donation right now if I could.
AI will inevitably kill all the sources of actual information. Then all we’re going to be left with is the fuzzy learned version of information plus a heap of hallucinations.
What a time to be alive.
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
You replied to OP while somehow missing the entire point of what he said lol
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.
Man, we hardly did that shit 20 years ago. Ain’t no way the kids doing that now.
At best they’ll probably prompt AI into validating if the text is legit
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Eh, people said the exact same thing about Wikipedia in the early 2000’s. A group of randos on the internet is going to “crowd source” truth? Absurd! And the answer to that was always, “You can check the source to make sure it says what they say it says.” If you’re still checking Wikipedia sources, then you’re going to check the sources AI provides as well. All that changes about the process is how you get the list of primary sources. I don’t mind AI as a method of finding sources.
The greater issue is that people rarely check primary sources. And even when they do, the general level of education needed to read and understand those sources is a somewhat high bar. And the even greater issue is that AI-generated half-truths are currently mucking up primary sources. Add to that intentional falsehoods from governments and corporations, and it already seems significantly more difficult to get to the real data on anything post-2020.
But Wikipedia actually is crowd sourced data verification. Every AI prompt response is made up on the fly and there’s no way to audit what other people are seeing for accuracy.
Hey! An excuse to quote my namesake.
Hackworth got all the news that was appropriate to his situation in life, plus a few optional services: the latest from his favorite cartoonists and columnists around the world; the clippings on various peculiar crackpot subjects forwarded to him by his father […] A gentleman of higher rank and more far-reaching responsibilities would probably get different information written in a different way, and the top stratum of New Chuasan actually got the Times on paper, printed out by a big antique press […] Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. One of the insights of the Victorian Revivial was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in society, the more similar one’s Times became to one’s peers’. - The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1995)
That is to say, I agree that everyone getting different answers is an issue, and it’s been a growing problem for decades. AI’s turbo-charged it, for sure. If I want, I can just have it yes-man me all day long.
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.
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.
Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
FWIW:
Wikipedia:Reference desk
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.
Not me. I value Wikipedia content over AI slop.
all websites should block ai and bot traffic on principle.
FWIW:
Wikipedia:Bot policy#Bot requirements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_policy#Bot_requirements
RationalWiki:Bots
The problem is many no longer identify as bots and come from hundreds if not thousands of IPs.
Voight-Kampff them.
I’m part of the problem. I now use Le Chat instead of search engines because AI destroyed search engines, thanks to all the content mills that make slop. I wish search engines just worked, and it’s a classic example of capitalism creating problems to justify new technology.
And I wonder if it’s just AI. I know some people moved to backing up pre-2025 versions of Wikipedia via Kiwix out of fear that the site gets censored. I know now that I’ve done that, it’s a no-brainer to just do my Wikipedia research without using bandwidth.
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.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.
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 comments.
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.
I asked a chatbot scenarios for AI wiping out humanity and the most believable one is where it makes humans so dependent and infantilized on it that we just eventually stop reproducing and die out.
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.
So we get the Wall-e future…
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.
I guess I’m a bit old school, I still love Wikipedia.
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.
Yep, that an occasionally Wiktionary, Wikidata, and even Rationalwiki.
You’re right bro but I feel comfortable searching the old fashioned way!
It’s also much better at looking up stuff than Google.
Or maybe it’s just as bad but extremely confident, so you accept the wrong results. ChatGPT is just looking at Reddit and Google search results through an additional layer of language processing, it can’t possibly be better than either. Every day AI bros tell us “no seriously now they fixed search!” and I do the exact same benchmark of 10 easy questions that you can first an answer to within the first five results of a traditional search, and they fail on 6 out of 10.
To get a decent result on Google, you have to wade through 2 pages of ads, 4 pages of sponsored content, and maybe the first good result is on page 10.
ChatGPT does a good job at filtering most of the bullshit.
I know enough to not just accept any shit from the internet at face value.
To get a decent result on Google, you have to wade through 2 pages of ads, 4 pages of sponsored content, and maybe the first good result is on page 10.
Block ads and use a different search engine?
ChatGPT does a good job at filtering most of the bullshit.
You repeated that twice, but it’s demonstrably false. It does not. It feeds you completely wrong information randomly.
I know enough to not just accept any shit from the internet at face value.
If you’re going to fact check ChatGPT anyway, you’re wasting more time than just doing the research yourself with good tools. But this is a false equivalency, because by doing the research yourself you start to learn good sources and exercise information synthesis, by using ChatGPT and fact checking it you’re helping Sam Altman get richer.
Why the fuck are you defending google so hard lmao.
Google will absolutely put bad information front and center too.
And by using Google you make Google richer. In fact you get served far more ads using Google products than chatGPT.
What’s your fucking point lmao.
Why the fuck are you defending google so hard lmao.
Ah yes, when I said “use a different search engine” as a solution to Google having issues I’m certainly defending Google! What an endorsement right? “Use a completely different service” is free publicity for Google!
Other search engines are even worse than Google lmao. Brave consistently provide literally the worst results. Duck duck go same.
Are you actually serious.
I think you missed a part of their comment:
Block ads and use a different search engine?
Both Ecosia and DuckDuckGo have served me pretty well. Kagi also seems somewhat interesting.
Ecosia is working with Qwant on their own index, the first version of which has already gone online I believe. So they’re no longer exclusively relying on Bing/Google for their back-end.
Same but with Encyclopedia Brittanica
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.
Or the ai search just rips off Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, is becoming one of few places I trust the information.
How ironic that school teachers spent decades lecturing us about not trusting Wikipedia… and now, the vast majority of them seem to rely on Youtube and ChatGPT for their lesson plans. Lmao
It’s funny that MAGA and ml tankies both think that Wikipedia is the devil.
Tankies don’t think Wikipedia is the devil. You could call me a tankie from my political views, and I very much appreciate Wikipedia and use it on a daily basis. That is not to say it should be used uncritically and unaware of its biases.
Because of the way Wikipedia works, it requires sourcing claims with references, which is a good thing. The problem comes when you have an overwhelming majority of available references in one topic being heavily biased in one particular direction for whatever reason.
For example, when doing research on geopolitically charged topics, you may expect an intrinsic bias in the source availability. Say you go to China and create an open encyclopedia, Wikipedia style, and make an article about the Tiananmen Square events. You may expect that, if the encyclopedia is primarily edited by Chinese users using Chinese language sources, given the bias in the availability of said sources, the article will end up portraying the bias that the sources suffer from.
This is the criticism of tankies towards Wikipedia: in geopolitically charged topics, western sources are quick to unite. We saw it with the genocide in Palestine, where most media regardless of supposed ideological allegiance was reporting on the “both sides are bad” style at best, and outright Israeli propaganda at worst.
So, the point is not to hate on Wikipedia, Wikipedia is as good as an open encyclopedia edited by random people can get. The problem is that if you don’t specifically incorporate filters to compensate for the ideological bias present in the demographic cohort of editors (white, young males of English-speaking countries) and their sources, you will end up with a similar bias in your open encyclopedia. This is why us tankies say that Wikipedia isn’t really that reliable when it comes to, e.g., the eastern block or socialist history.
One would think that leftists, socialists, communists, tankies, and/or others would come up with supplementary wikis such as Conservapedia or RationalWiki that are good.
and, FWIW:
Category:Wikidebates
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Category:Wikidebates
e.g.
Is capitalism sustainable?
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Is_capitalism_sustainable%3F
It’s sad how little news there is relatively little news in Wikinews ( https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page ).
They are scared of facts.
There’s a lot of problems with Wikipedia, but in my years editing there (I’m extended protected rank), I’ve come to terms that it’s about as good as it can be.
In all but one edit war, the better sourced team came out on top. Source quality discussion is also quite good. There’s a problem with from positive/negative tone in articles, and sometimes articles get away with bad sourcing before someone can correct it, but this is about as good as any information hub can get.
And don’t forget the British-American bias. Hopefully the automated translation and adaptation that is being pursued by wikipedia helps to improve it.
I remember in the past few years that I’ve had to switch to non-American or non-British versions of Wikipedia just in order to find the answer I was looking for.
We need to remind Americans and Britains that knowledge on Wikipedia doesn’t stop with their languages. We need to do a better job of gathering knowledge from non-English sources and translating those into English. Same goes vice versa for English sources and pages into languages that other people can understand.
There’s still a lot of work to be done with Wikipedia to make it truly a universal knowledge repository. But it is one of the best we have
I remeber an article form a decade or more ago which did some research and said that basically, yes there are inaccuracies on Wikipedia, and yes there are over-simplifications, but** no more than in any other encyclopaedia**. They argued that this meant that it should be considered equally valid as an academic resource.
Thank you for your service 🫡
Any chance you remember what that one edit war was about?
It’s worth checking out the contribs and talk regarding articles that can be divisive. People acting with ulterior motives and inserting their own bias are fairly common. They also make regular corrections for this reason. I still place more faith and trust in Wikipedia as an info source more than most news articles.
Wikipedia has an imperfect process, but it is open to review and you can see how the sausage is made. It isn’t perfect, but the best we have.
Luv u Wiki
MAGA and tankies are pretty much the same except MAGA votes while tankies whine.
Red hat vs red coat fascists
That instance is fucking bananas
So very much on-script though
The site engages in holocaust denial, apologia for wehrmacht, and directly collaborates with western governments. On the talk pages users will earnestly tell you that mentioning napalm can stick to objects when submerged in water constitutes “unnecessary POV”, and third-degree burns are painless because they destroy nerve tissue (don’t ask how the tissue got destroyed, and they will not be banned for this so get used to it). Jimmy Wales is a far-right libertarian. It might be a reliable source of information for reinforcing your own worldview, but it’s not a project to create the world’s encyclopedia. Something like that would at least be less stingy about what a “notable sandwich” is.
Ah yes, you were personally insulted and now discredit the biggest collection of knowledge the world has ever had. Fuck you, you fool.
WRONG. You are thinking of the Quran 🙏🏻🤲🏻
As a Wikipedia editor I can comfirm - we regularly say that napalm sticking to objects in water is POV. I do it at least twice a week. I’ll try making a bot to do it automatically so I’ll have more time for holocaust denial.
I have been editing Wikipedia since 2004, and my very first edit was to deny a clearly POV edit to a sticky napalm article. It’s kind of a point of pride for me.
As a fellow Wikipedia editor I have confirmed that you are in fact the intern who kept making edits directly from the Capitol without even using a VPN.
Citation needed.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Show me. That’s a simple request.
No it doesn’t
This is a very low-quality reply. Try making more high-quality replies to contribute to discussions here on Lemmy. Thanks!
I don’t care what that is, you post too much on here. I’m blocking and supplanting you.
Supplanting?
You’ll have to use smaller words for me, boss.
Try not making shit up
growing up I got taught by teachers not trust Wiki bc of misinformation. times have changed
Not to trust wiki as a format? Or did you mean Wikipedia specifically?
subject at hand was wikipedia, but it applies to any wiki format I guess - just check sources.
Nope, we all misunderstood what they meant. Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, it is a derivative work. However, you can use the sources provided by the Wikipedia article and use the article itself to understand the topic.
Wikipedia isn’t and was never a primary source of information, and that is by design. You don’t declare information in encyclopedias, you inventory information.
“Nope” to what exactly? you regurgitated what I said - but told us how you misunderstood it
Wikipedia was not then what it is now. You’re spot on with all that, spot on, but in the early days it wasn’t nearly as trustworthy.
Fair enough, I’m not old enough to remember those days of Wikipedia, my memory starts in roughly 2010 wrt Wikipedia use 😅
You can check old versions of any article by clicking ‘history’. And yeah, the standards used to be pretty low.
Now in some states, you can’t trust teachers not to be giving you misinformation.
We homeschool our daughter. Saw a cool history through film course that taught with an example movie every week to grow interest… nothing in the itinerary said they’d play a video of Columbus by PragerU. They refused the refund, as it was 2 weeks in, and said it was used to foment conversation, but no other video was being offered or no questions were prepared to challenge the children. I worded my letter to call out the facts about Columbus vs the video, and the lack of accreditation of the source. I tried not to be the “lib”, but I very much got the gist that’s their opinion of me, and how they brushed me off. That fucking site is a plague on common sense, decency, and truth. Still fired up, and it was last month. We pulled her out of the course immediately after the video.
I can’t imagine homeschooling. Not that I think it’s bad but that it has to be so hard to do. And harder still to do it right.
Glad you pulled out of that course. PragerU is hot garbage and I hate how my autocorrect apparently knows PragerU and didn’t try to change it to something else.
How hard do you find it to homeschool? How many hours do you reckon it takes a day?
You’ve gotta keep in mind that in a regular school your kid is one of 20-30 for the teacher and they are lucky if they get five minutes of individual help/instruction. Everything else is just lecture, reading, and assignments.
It doesn’t have to be onerous. We homeschooled until around 3rd grade. Even so, the other kids they are in school with are academically… not stellar. My youngest (13) has a reading disability and she struggles to pass classes. She still frequently finds herself helping out other students because they are even worse off.
I’m not anti-public education, but whether it’s Covid or just republicans gutting the system, public education is in a state right now. I figure funding needs to increase by 30-50%. Kids need more resources than they are getting. And until they do, homeschooling isn’t an unreasonable option. But it’s not for everyone, of course. One parent has to work (or not) from home or odd hours.
If this is only 6 weeks ago now then you can still most likely do a credit card charge back if you paid that way
deleted by creator
One thing I don’t get: why the fuck LLM’s don’t use wikipedia as a source of info? Would help them coming up with less bullshit. I experimented around with some, even perplexity that searches the web and gives you links, but it always has shit sources like reddit or SEO optimized nameless news sites
Perplexity is okay with more academic topics at the least, albeit pretty shallow (usually isn’t that different to google). There might be a policy not to include encyclopedias, but it would be an improvement over SEO garbage for sure.
Yeah, I use it instead of search, as that has gone to shit years ago due to all the SEO garbage, and now it’s even worst with AI generated SEO garbage.
At least this way I get fast results, and mostly accurate on the high level. But I agree that if I try to go deeper, it just makes up stuff based on 9 yrs old reddit posts.
I wish somebody built an AI model that prioritized trusted data, like encyclopedias, wiki, vetted publication, prestige news portals. It would be much more useful, and could put Google out of business. Unfortunately, Perplexity is not that
Who would’ve thought??
