Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash

[highplainsdem]

Source: 404 Media

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.

“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”

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For years, Wikipedia has been one of the most valuable repositories of information in the world, and a laudable model for community-based, democratic internet platform governance. Its importance has only grown in the last couple of years during the generative AI boom as it’s one of the only internet platforms that has not been significantly degraded by the flood of AI-generated slop and misinformation. As opposed to Google, which since embracing generative AI has instructed its users to eat glue, Wikipedia’s community has kept its articles relatively high quality. As I recently reported last year, editors are actively working to filter out bad, AI-generated content from Wikipedia.

-snip-

Wikimedia announced that it was going to run the generated summaries experiment on June 2, and was immediately met with dozens of replies from editors who said “very bad idea,” “strongest possible oppose,” Absolutely not,” etc.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-pauses-ai-generated-summaries-after-editor-backlash/

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Good. They're sticking with human intelligence instead of experimenting with artificial idiocy.

[RockRaven]

1. One of the only useful things on the internet, and they want to make themselves trash.

What fucking idiots.

[Silent Type]

2. I wouldn't mind the option to see both. I like Wikipedia a lot, but don't take their stuff as gospel unless

it’s just something I am curious about for a second. Same with AI.

I won’t be ticked if they skip AI.

[sinkingfeeling]

3. Good for them.

[highplainsdem]

5. There are different types of AI. The generative AI type doing so much harm is rarely what's used in science

and medicine. Which thread here said AI restored a patient's sight?

[IA8IT]

6. Good News!!! AI is Digital Kudzu F**king everywhere

[DENVERPOPS]

7. We already have

Artificial Intelligence in the Republican Politicians and Trump's CABAL........

Look no further than all their statements about practically everything, showing their level of education equal to a third grader in all areas....
Science, Math, History, English, World Events, etc etc etc

[usaf-vet]

8. I believe Project 2025 admitted to using AI to develop the plan to dismantle our democracy. It seems fair that we....

.... In opposition to that destructive plan, use all the resources we can muster to fight back.

If I use AI to have it find all the references to a negative phrase, and it can cite them in 2 minutes, why is that idiocy?

[highplainsdem]

9. It's idiocy because it dumbs down and deskills users. It's idiocy because it always has to be checked

and ends up saving little or no time. It's idiocy because AI search is absolutely destroying the websites the AI training data is drawn from, and at the same time using ten times as much electricity (and water to cool the data centers) as standard search.

It's idiocy because although the results should ALWAYS be checked, people often don't, and AI's errors and hallucinations are spread far and wide, even published in scientific and medical journals.

And on top of everything else, genAI is fundamentally unethical to use because it was illegally trained on stolen intellectual property.

If you think your saving a bit of time using an unethical tool to get an answer that's likely to be wrong - and causes all that harm - is more important than the rights of the people who created that content, you really should think again.