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Wikipedia Has Banned AI-Generated Articles

posted by mrpg on Friday April 03, @07:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the It-is-not-a-ban,-it-is-a-human-only-VIP-lounge dept.
News

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/ai/wikipedia-has-banned-ai-generated-articles-173641377.html?src=rss

English Wikipedia has banned the use of generative AI when writing or rewriting articles. The platform says it came to this decision because using AI to whip up copy "often violates several of Wikipedia's core content policies."

There are a couple of minor exceptions. Editors can use large language models (LLMs) to refine their own writing, but only if the copy is checked for accuracy. The policy states that this is because LLMs "can go beyond what you ask of them and change the meaning of the text such that it is not supported by the sources cited."

Editors can also use LLMs to assist with language translation. However, they must be fluent enough in both languages to catch errors. Once again, the information must be checked for inaccuracies.

Original Submission


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by turgid on Friday April 03, @08:27AM (14 children)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 03, @08:27AM (#1438794) Journal

    This is more woke undemocratic Marxism from Wokepedia.

    How is The Truth(TM) supposed to prevail over woke liberal left bias if the LLMs aren't allowed to hallucinate it for us? Riddle me that!

    Bloody commies.

    • (Score: 5, Touché) by pe1rxq on Friday April 03, @09:50AM (1 child)

      by pe1rxq (844) on Friday April 03, @09:50AM (#1438796) Homepage

      Moderation is becoming hard these days. I really want this to be a 'funny' post. But I can't really distinguish those from literal maga quotes anymore....

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @02:04PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @02:04PM (#1438810)

        as far as I'm concerned it is more on point to mod these as "what a joke" ie. "funny"

        you have 5 clicks in the positive direction vs only 1 to troll.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by chucky on Friday April 03, @09:50AM (11 children)

      by chucky (3309) on Friday April 03, @09:50AM (#1438797)

      It’s really interesting how the moderation on this post changes. From informative through funny to troll… I suggest we make a tracker: if you see yet another mod, write below what it was.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @11:57AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @11:57AM (#1438799)

        At 11:56 am UTC, parent was at +5 funny.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @11:59AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @11:59AM (#1438800)

          Whoops, s/parent/grandparent is at +5 funny.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @12:34PM (7 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @12:34PM (#1438801)

        They come out in force whenever anything with a humanist bent is posted here.

        I've stopped saying "left" and "right".
        It is now humanist vs fascist

        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Friday April 03, @02:25PM (3 children)

          by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 03, @02:25PM (#1438812) Journal

          Talking of humanism [newhumanist.org.uk], there's an interesting article about standing up to tyranny and propaganda [newhumanist.org.uk].

          • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday April 03, @03:39PM (2 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 03, @03:39PM (#1438817) Journal
            The link is titled "Six voices on how to fight propaganda". One of those "voices" is not like the others. Michael Mann in his defamation lawsuit against defendants Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg lied in court about the alleged harm done to his reputation. The defendants had compared [soylentnews.org] official investigations of Mann's conduct from Climategate to the whitewashing received by a convicted child molester, Jerry Sandusky. Both Mann and Sandusky worked for the same university, University of Pennsylvannia and received the same shallow investigative effort by that university.

            So anyway, in support of his lawsuit, Mann and his lawyers claimed [powerlineblog.com] that Mann lost a bunch of grants including one for $9 million. Under cross examination, it was revealed that the $9 million had been revised under oath to $112k, but that the defense team had gone with the original amount just the same. The judge concluded:

            Given such circumstances, the Court can only find that Mr. Williams and Mr. Fontaine knew about the errors in Exhibit 517A prior to Mr. Fontaine’s use of Exhibit 517A in his redirect examination. The Court further finds that Mr. Williams and Mr. Fontaine could not have reasonably believed otherwise, as a “reasonably diligent inquiry” would have revealed that Exhibit 517A was erroneous and outdated, especially where Mr. Williams and Mr. Fontaine have been personally involved in this case since at least 2012, when the case was filed, (1) as longtime counsel for Dr. Mann in this litigation, (2) as the attorneys who assisted Dr. Mann in preparing his original, supplemental, and amended discovery responses, and (3) as Dr. Mann’s lead counsel who prepared for trial and engaged in the necessary tasks related to reviewing Dr. Mann’s likely testimony and the Parties’ related exhibits on such a central issue in the case. … They each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.

            Bolding from the link to emphasize the judge's ruling concerning Mann's involvement. And that's how Michael Mann ended up paying more in fines for winning his defamation case than the defendants did (the $1 million in punitive damages against Steyn was reduced to $5001, Mann paid a bit more than that to cover the legal fees of the defendants from having to defend against a bogus argument).

            For me, this violates the first rule of problems: don't make the problem worse. Mann stooped to lying in court so he could get a better payout and more effectively spread the propaganda that he was being persecuted by anti-science forces. As Mann said at the time:

            "I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech," Mann said.

            What keeps getting missed here is that advocacy for dealing with climate change has a long term honesty and integrity problem. That did more to undermine the climate change message than far right propaganda. We get endless blame about the propaganda while ignoring the real problems. That is propaganda itself. We're not making the problem better.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @07:25PM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @07:25PM (#1438836)

              Climate Change touches a nerve with you, doesn't it?

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 04, @04:14AM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 04, @04:14AM (#1438864) Journal

                Climate Change touches a nerve with you, doesn't it?

                Indeed.

                Consider this. The article was about "Six voices on how to fight propaganda". Three, half of those voices were about climate change. Climate change is way overrepresented as a problem and its proponents here spent too much time pushing their own propaganda. They were busy pulling out cliches about "climate deniers" and "there won’t be an Earth – at least not one that we’d recognise" rather than talk seriously about the propaganda that they supposedly face - being the problem rather than solving the problem.

                Now consider this. Back in 2022, I came across [soylentnews.org] a recent study of knowledge overconfidence in "anti-consensus views":

                The study asked subjects to rate their opposition to some scientific claim that is generally held to be true (a "consensus"). They then asked the subjects to evaluate their own knowledge in the area and finally tested the subjects on their actual knowledge of the subject. This resulted in a three value data set of "opposition", "subjective knowledge", and "objective knowledge". The opposition questions are listed in the above study.

                [...]

                The primary conclusion is that for a number of claims that are generally held to be true by consensus, opposition to those results show interesting correlations: opposition correlates negatively with objective knowledge (what the final test indicated that the subject knew about the field), and positively with subjective knowledge (what the subject thought they knew about the field). Those who were most opposed tended to exhibit a large gap between what they knew and what they thought they knew.

                There was one exception to that broad correlation. They had a question about climate change in there with the rest:

                Most of the warming of Earth’s average global temperature over the second half of the 20th century has been caused by human activities.

                Opposition to that question correlated slightly with objective knowledge about climate change. I think it's near unique for the scientific consensus on a subject to correlate even slightly among the population with ignorance of the subject. Frankly, I think climate change will end up being the greatest scientific hysteria of the 20th and 21st centuries due to its duration and vast misdirection of resources.

        • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @03:31PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @03:31PM (#1438815)

          The problem there being that as you've thrown the 'fascist' hand grenade, I'm betting that the people that you'd probably class as being 'humanist', i'd probably class as being 'unhumanist' with a goodly scattering of 'antihumanist' thrown in, in fact, the most fascist people in both outlook and actions that I've had the misfortune to meet over the past couple of decades have been members of groups covered by that 'humanist' multitude of sins.

          Over these decades I've found that, sadly, it is a truism that the most illiberal of people by their actions are those who are most liberal (by both the leftpond and rightpond definitions) politically, with very few and honourable exceptions.

          And, for the record, in my callow youth, and in two seperate incidents in two different cities, I've been both kicked unconscious and had my bloody nose broken fighting real actual fascists, not your ideological bogeymen, I'm too old and arthritic now to physically fight the former, and happily neither senile nor dumb enough to believe in the latter.

          • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @03:43PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @03:43PM (#1438818)

            "I'm betting that the people that you'd probably class as being 'humanist', i'd probably class as being 'unhumanist' "

            My definition is simple:

            https://humanists.international/what-is-humanism/ [humanists.international]

            as opposed to fascism which by Musolini's original definition, is corporatism.

            also

            https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/3166 [villanova.edu]

            • (Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Friday April 03, @04:36PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 03, @04:36PM (#1438823) Journal

              as opposed to fascism which by Musolini's original definition, is corporatism.

              Corporatism is merely that societal decisions are made by corporate groups (not corporations) working and negotiating with each other. You can be humanist and corporatist or unhumanist and corporatist. So not really saying anything. And keep in mind that under Musolini's original definition of fascism, the state is supreme: one "corporate group" completely dominates the rest. That's why I have a simple definition for fascism: My definition of Fascism is simple: 1) we're in charge, and 2) we'll let you have stuff as long as you slavishly obey rule 1. Things like corporatism, racism, kleptocracy, ideological hobbies, etc are flavor and depend on the implementation. I think it matches real world fascism well.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Friday April 03, @05:27PM

        by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Friday April 03, @05:27PM (#1438829) Homepage Journal

        Poe's Law [wikipedia.org] comes into play. Those marking him "troll" are a) ones who think he's serious and b) MAGATs (Make America Grate Again Trumpies) who see that he's making fun of them.

        Note: anything negative about MAGATs will almost certainly garner you at least one "troll" mod, especially the acronym MAGAT.

        --
        Are the Republicans really in favor of genocide, or are they just cowards terrified of terrorist twit Trump?
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