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points by Cthulhu_ 2 days ago | 0 comments

I think they have to; while at first glance AI generated content is impressive, it becomes noisy and sameish at larger scale or the more you read it. I'm of the opinion that AI is here to stay and a valuable tool for many use cases, but writing authoritative content ain't it. Wikipedia is fighting it (and other influences from before AI, like unsubstantiated claims and whatnot), I hope the scientific community and journalism steps up too.

[–] jonhohle 2 days ago

Wikipedia is also a training source and shouldn’t also be a model output for content. Eventually it will be an oroborus, but it seems prudent to avoid that for as long as possible.

[–] DonaldPShimoda 2 days ago

A little over a year ago, the MIT Technology Review ran a piece about how outputting AI content to non-English Wikipedia is rapidly corrupting the primary training data for uncommon languages because of exactly this process: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikip...

[–] Natsu 2 days ago

It's funny to think that pre-LLM archives are the new low-background steel.

[–] rc1 2 days ago

Ironically. Wikipedia already links that concept to low-background steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel#Cultural_...

[–] progbits 2 days ago

Krazam has a video about that.

[–] throwaway2037 2 days ago

"Rare Data Hunters"[1]? Man, the production quality went through the roof on his newest stuff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc

[–] adventured 2 days ago

It certainly may place a very high value on archive.org over time thanks to their historical timestamping

[–] DonaldPShimoda 2 days ago

Ooh, I like this way of thinking of it. Thanks for that!

[–] mschuster91 2 days ago

Hence all the AI labs buying up and destroying physical books. Even "yellow press" stuff, pulp fiction, dime novels and whatnot "low quality" literature are a valuable source of how actual humans write.

I wouldn't even have much of a problem with it - if these labs would be fair enough to humanity as a whole to provide the raw scans after the process is completed, and if they would limit themselves to books that have been on the market for more than 20 years.

[–] aesthesia 2 days ago

> if these labs would be fair enough to humanity as a whole to provide the raw scans after the process is completed

Unfortunately, this would get them an even bigger copyright smackdown than they've already received.

[–] sho_hn 2 days ago

Wait, they received a copyright smackdown? When?

[–] aesthesia 16 hours ago

https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

[–] will5421 2 days ago

And destroying!?

[–] msla 2 days ago

What do you think bookstores do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_book

> A stripped book is a mass market paperback that has been stripped of its cover in order to be recycled. The covers are returned to the publisher as evidence that the books have been destroyed and to obtain a credit on the purchase price.[1] The books are meant to be destroyed by pulping but some find their way to street merchants, sometimes by illegal means, and are resold.[2]

I grew up reading books with this ditty in them:

> If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

Those books certainly weren't scanned before being pulped. Would've been illegal. Really, the big thing that destroys books is the copyright term being as long as it is.

[–] DonaldPShimoda 2 days ago

AI companies weren't buying up tons of unsold mass-market materials, and I think it's disingenuous to even make the comparison.

What was going on recently was AI companies were specifically seeking out rare — or sometimes irreplaceable — books to supplement their data sets (and hopefully getting a leg up on their competitors). The destruction of the books wasn't the point, it was just a consequence of the business-oriented realization that they could scan the contents of more books faster if they just chopped off the bindings rather than investing the time to care for the books and keep them intact (plus supposedly playing along with copyright law by "only having one copy of the copyrighted material").

[–] paradox460 2 days ago

Every tor SF book I've ever read had that. Neat little bit of history

[–] layer8 2 days ago

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-de...

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/amazon-destroyi...

[–] frozenseven 2 days ago

So, just like libraries and retailers already do?

[–] matkoniecz 2 days ago

From my understanding, they are legally obligated to in this case.

[–] shevy-java 2 days ago

The Holy Inquisition was also required to burn witches in the medieval era.

That does not really make it a law though.

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

A human did this first with Scots Wikipedia by rewriting English articles in Scottish eye dialect of English and passing it off as Scots.

[–] phoghed 2 days ago

The models are already trained on model output on purpose

[–] xp84 2 days ago

Maybe so, but in a controlled and deliberate fashion.

Not just random output of who knows what model, from who knows what prompt.

[–] gpvos 2 days ago

Indeed, Wikipedia has been battling similar problems before, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

[–] dylan604 2 days ago

> it becomes noisy and sameish at larger scale or the more you read it.

I absolutely understand where you are coming from, and I agree to a point. If you're of an age where you actually read a printed encyclopedia, the tone and voice of the entire set was sameish as well. The difference is that it didn't sound LLMish like LLM text does. I know that printed encyclopedias would have been vetted by editors, and I feel this is the key difference. Editors not only knew grammar rules, but had that sense of good writing practices that's hard to write down as rules. A piece of text passed through a good editorial review will read human while LLM text reads as LLM text.

[–] contrast 2 days ago

What you're describing though is that individual source of content tends to sound like itself. That isn't a problem so much as what we tend to want and expect.

When we say AI sounds same-ish we mean all sources of content can sound the same - fiction and non-fiction, news articles and blog posts, marketing pitches and ai drafted personal messages, all sound kinda the same. That is a different situation, and that's before you get to "and that one sound is LLMish".

[–] zobzu 2 days ago

what's funny of that the llm learns from Wikipedia and then is used to put data back in Wikipedia. can't imagine that going well lol

[–] visarga 2 days ago

I think this is exactly what we should do. Send agents to collect evidence and write deep research reports, then train on those reports. DR reports are derived from hundreds of sources and can map out the distribution, what are the opinions on a topic, not necessarily what is the one correct answer. Agents could write one piece about every human, place, topic, event or entity there is under the sun. They could also try to generate the same without sources (closed-book mode) and report on LLM biases on that question.

[–] em3rgent0rdr 2 days ago

Please let's not clutter up wikipedia with new articles for every entity in the universe. It would be too much for humans to review. Though it sure would be funny to see an AI-peida as you describe.

[–] visarga 12 hours ago

It would not be inside Wikipedia, but separate, as a collection used in the training corpus.

[–] shevy-java 2 days ago

A lot of AI content is just wrong - hallucinated lies. Just look at Grok-slop by the right-arm raising billionaire clown. It looks neat on the surface but once you dig in you begin to see more and more errors, thus wasting your time.

[–] bluGill 2 days ago

AI is great at making poor writing good. I've had good luck having AI turn my rough draft into something readable. (just check my comment history to see how bad my rough drafts normally are). AI is also reasonably good at research and fact checking. But in all cases you need to think before you accept anything AI says. AI generated content all too often hasn't been checked, some is good but some is awful and an expert needs to decide which is which.

That is AI is a tool. I've driven screws with a hammer - it worked in a pinch, but it was not good. People have also used hammers to kill others.

[–] Blackthorn 2 days ago

It makes poor writing readable, not good.

[–] amenhotep 2 days ago

It makes poor writing look superficially more considered. More readable, no, not when you realise.

[–] rootusrootus 2 days ago

> I've driven screws with a hammer

That takes a lot of commitment, you really have to want that screw in pretty badly! And when you're done it ends up just being a worse nail.

[–] jacquesm 2 days ago

There are nails that have threads on them that are made especially for this purpose.

[–] rootusrootus 2 days ago

That's fair, ring shanks are a thing, but I was thinking more along the lines of a wood screw with deep threads. That just sounds like looking for pain. I'd expect it to chew things up pretty badly, too, though I have so far lacked the commitment to try pounding a screw with a hammer ;).

[–] jacquesm 2 days ago

https://buildingsandmoreng.com/products/3-twisted-iron-nails...

[–] AngryData 2 days ago

Ring shanks do exist, but they are also made with a softer iron so it can be struck with a hammer and bend instead of fracture or snap off.

[–] IAmBroom 2 days ago

No, there aren't. Ring shanks have ridges, not threads.

[–] tfvlrue 2 days ago

I think they were talking about spiral shank nails, not ring shank. It has a twisted grove along the shank of the nail, sort of like an extremely course thread.

I've seen these used to assemble wooden palettes (they are VERY hard to remove). A search on Home Depot reveals they may be used for certain types of siding as well.

[–] jacquesm 2 days ago

'coarse'

I built a house with them. You really want to check twice if you're putting them in where you want them because getting them out is - as you noted - annoyingly difficult. But they're very nice for large surfaces that are going be battered by the wind, they're much longer than your typical screw and working with them is very fast.

[–] jacquesm 2 days ago

See other comment.

[–] jacquesm 2 days ago

It seems good. And that's a major problem, one of the signals for quality is not useless.

[–] JoshTriplett 2 days ago

I'd much rather see your rough drafts than whatever AI turns it into.

[–] bluGill 2 days ago

Depends on if they are verified or just accepted.