Submitted 20 hours ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.zip
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/
“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”
Archived version: archive.is/…/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dange…
AI creating more poor thinkers is how I read this. Its like that outer limits episode where everyone is hooked up to all the answers mentally and one guy can’t have the implant. In the end he is the only who can find his own answers.
More proof that AI ruins everything - if it was needed.
Well, you won’t ever be losing me, WP.
We got WordPress’s number one fan here.
I’ll be honest with you: I have absolutely no idea how to interpret that in this context.
My view of the danger is that people are sourcing facts from AI instead of Wikipedia. Not worried about volunteers, they’re not going anywhere.
Both are not a source. Both can lead you to a real source.
‘facts’
I cancelled my donations to wikipedia since the WMF announced they’d be using AI, and they gave me a really milquetoast bullshit response when I emailed them. Can’t trust such a precious, collaborative, Human effort as Wikipedia to a bunch of anti-human robofuckers. 🤷♂️
Correct me if im wrong, but haven’t they since gone back on AI integration, and are no longer planning any, after backlash from their contributors?
Honestly, I don’t know. I stopped listening after they said they were going to.
Too little too late for me really; unless they replace the people who made that decision in the first place, that sort of anti-human, lazy, irresponsible sentiment will remain present in their leadership.
It’s like the search summary problem, only worse. Before, people lost traffic already cause Google would try to answer the question with a snippet from your site; however, LLMs (or at least ChatGPT) are trained on Wikipedia, because it’s available data. With Reddit being first, Wikipedia being the second largest source of facts they used (at least, according to statista).
Side note, you’re not even supposed to source facts from Reddit or Wikipedia, they’re better for finding other sources. It’s like a game of telephone, at the tertiary source you’re getting even less accurate information. It’s just oh so stupid the direction end users are herded towards.
AI scrapers don’t make donations
That’s a problem across the board. Assuming AI does establish itself, all it’s training data dries up and we basically stagnate.
Also, in this weird inbetween phase until it is actually good, we’ve already generated so much bullshit that AI trains on the hallucinations of other AIs.
As some point we will train it on live data similar to how human babies are trained. There’s always more data.
And the AIs themselves can generate data. There have been a few recent news stories about AIs doing novel research, that will only become more prevalent over time.
I don’t use AI at all
For me, it depends what year it is
What about non-human visitors?
I’ve been saying this for some time now: AI is going to kill so many business models because it’s really great at creating summaries.
You don’t even need a huge cloud-basrd AI! Local AI—running on your PC—can search the web, summarize the news (and Wikipedia articles), and perform similar tasks without a human ever visiting the site.
It’s like having your own personal secretary that you can tell to go do stuff.
I think it’s going to kill free search engines because it can go do a search on all of them at once in seconds and no human will ever see those ads.
I think it’s going to kill free search engines because it can go do a search on all of them at once in seconds and no human will ever see those ads.
So sites will move to paywall or aggresive WAFs and those LLMs will become useless at the same time succeeding in killing search engines leaving no viable alternatives.
Already half the public internet is inaccessible without allowing to be heavily fingerprinted and be tracked just to prove you are a human user.
It’s possible that a huge number of sites that are currently free will turn to paywalls but that won’t make the local AI useless. You’ll just give it your login credentials for any sites you want it to search and it’ll do it’s thing (and no, captias don’t work with AI models… They’re only good at stopping basic crawlers).
If you think AI is going to stay without ads/subscriptions for much longer you’re not paying attention
Don’t need subscriptions for a local AI friend
It’s been the goolge search results ai are mostly just ripping text from wikipedia
Well maybe if there wasn’t a huge banner bugging me for 3.50 like the lock ness monster at the top of every article people wouldn’t need to use LLMs to get the useful info /s
I cannot read the article, but this seems like a non-issue.
Loads of old Wikipedia pages are essentially complete. Just freeze them.
And didn’t the Wikipedia foundation have years worth of funding already? And wouldn’t fewer visitors imply less need for server and bandwidth?
Current events need editors, and those will have controversy. I expect primary news sources would be better for anything less than a week old.
A Wikipedia that freezes at 2024 would still be of great value.
Clearly, I am missing the problem.
Old events are not frozen. There are these things called historians and archeologists who are, to this very day believe it or not, still researching “old” events and updating the facts as they find new sources or correct old ones.
Gotta drive those donations somehow
enrich the content
I like Wikipedia but it’s like Stack Overflow. Your changes will be reverted by the owner who watches his pages all day long.
It’s not so bad, really. I’ve changed a few pages. As long as you follow the rules to the letter you usually get your changes accepted.
Wikipedia mad it got competition.
Libertarians be like: free market, competition, no state.
Unless it affects them, then its: how unfair that I can’t have a monopoly, I want the state to remove my competitors.
Is the Wikipedia foundation libertarian? And where do you think the AIs are ripping all their data from?
As far as I know they aren’t some nefarious mega corporation.
AFAIK the founder of Wikipedia is a libertarian who believes the free market will solve all problems. He, of course, has to make a bunch of excuses for why Wikipedia itself isn’t being helped by the Free Market^tm , such as “We don’t have real capitalism bro just trust me bro please donate.”
Just edit the article of you don’t like what Wikipedia says.
Yeah that’s what I do. Won a few arguments this way.
Just make wikipedia full of AI content. (/s)
Pretty telling that AI will use most any shitty source besides one that is actually a pretty decent summary of sources.
Before I figured out how to turn it off DDG’s (DuckDuckGo) AI usually sourced Wikipedia if there was an article available.
Eq0@literature.cafe 17 hours ago
Personally, I have been moving the opposite way. There are so many bullshit websites, wading through them is a pain. Instead, I directly jump to Wikipedia
gary@piefed.world 17 hours ago
Same! I have Wikipedia pinned as the first search result on Kagi if there's an entry