Lesson#4: AI and Wikipedia (Part 1)
In the July 23, 2023 New York Times Magazine, Jon Gertner, wrote about this very topic. He interviewed one of Wikipedia's most prolific editors, who is called, Barkeep49 (to protect his privacy). Barkeep49 said, "I think AIs day of a high-quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later," in an essay called "The Death of Wikipedia."
Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia, says that the goal of Wikipedia is to create a world where every person on the planet is given free access to all human language and knowledge. Wikipedia currently is among the top 10 most visited websites.
The new AI/LLM Chatbots are typically using the totality of Wikipedia's corpus. This content has been painstakingly amassed by Wikipedia editors and contributors over the past 20 years, and it has been proven that AI would not exist if it were not for Wikipedia's free content says Nicholas Vincent, Professor at Simon Fraser University, who has extensively studied how Wikipedia is used by Google search algorithms.
RECENT CONFERENCE CALL
Last March, the main Wikipedia contributing editors had a conference call to discuss AIs potential threats to Wikipedia's existence, including benefits, hopes, and anxieties. Many things were discussed but the final conclusion of this group was clear: "We want a world in which knowledge is created by human beings.
But is it already too late for that?
Another important conclusion the call had was that trends like online misinformation require more vigilance than ever before. ChatGPT's recent success did not surprise the conference attendees --- though several of its editors were shocked by the speed of its adoption, which only needed two months for its users to reach 100 million.
--- End of Wikipedvia vs. AI Part 1 of 4 ---
Source: New York Times Magazine Article: Moment of Truth - Can Wikipedia help teach AI chatbots to get their facts right, Jon Gertner, 7.23.23, page 34.
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