Meta is experimenting with using AI to write Wikipedia articles: https://ai.facebook.com/research/publications/generating-full-length-wikipedia-biographies-the-impact-of-gender-bias-on-the-retrieval-based-generation-of-women-biographies
I personally have a very bad feeling about this. I’m most afraid of this making it easier to spam the encyclopedia with fake information that looks plausible on the surface, and therefore doesn't get fully fact-checked. This could also create perverse incentives where SEO companies put out false information online to bias Meta's algorithm, and thereby sneak their way in to the encyclopedia. The decision to make this open source seems incredibly foolish to me as well, considering how easily a service like this could be misused. (Edit: It has been pointed out to me that if they made it closed-source that wouldn't be great either, since then we would have no idea what it was doing under the hood. Either way I wouldn't be happy, so I'm not sure their choice counts as a point against them.)
Am I overreacting? Is this actually a good thing? Is this actually way worse than I think it is? Who knows!
What are your thoughts on this?
This is a very strong statement! Would you be willing to make a specific prediction conditional on an AI passing the 'Wikipedia contributor' Turing test? (something like "if that happens, I predict x will happen within [y unit of time] with z probability" or something of the sort)
Not that there'll necessarily be anyone around to register it if you're correct, but still...