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points by berkes 2 days ago | 0 comments
If we leave out environmental (energy, datacenters, coolant) and political arguments (copyright stealing, private data harvesting etc.) even if we agree that those are "bad".

What then, is the problem of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia?

> Fake or misleading citations have become a major worry.

Why is this not a standalone problem? Humans can fake and mislead in citations too, in fact, this is a major problem and has been so, for literally centuries in science.

> Being a place that was, in theory, free from AI slop has become part of Wikipedia’s identity.

Isn't this a separate issue in itself too? One of "quality". If AI generates poor quality content, than I would think the poor quality is the problem, not the producer of it.

The article mentions several times how hard it is to detect AI content. If it is that hard, then obviously AI is doing a good job and producing content that matches that of humans. Why then insist on one type of producer?

[–] lemagedurage 2 days ago
Poor quality is the problem and since the bandwidth of editors doesn't magically grow with the amount of input, rejecting AI content is a very effective way to keep average quality up.
[–] metobehonest 2 days ago
>Isn't this a separate issue in itself too? One of "quality". If AI generates poor quality content, than I would think the poor quality is the problem, not the producer of it.

Yes, but who will review the mountains of slop to determine whether it is of acceptable quality? The main problem AI introduces is high volume at low quality, often overwhelming the human resource bottlenecks these systems have in place.

[–] berkes 1 day ago
Makes sense indeed, but then the quality nor the volume is the underlying problem, but the review process.

Apparently Wikipedia has good reasons to not change this process fundamentally, other than add extra filters at the start to try and detect low quality posts, based on attributes that show a correlation with low quality.

Sounds like a pragmatic, but far from ideal solution to me. Correlation is not causation.