Wikipedia tries to calm down the uproar caused by the proposal to generate texts with AI
The Wikimedia Foundation made the unfortunate decision to announce this week that it would test a new AI-powered article generator. The fury of the site’s editors was terrible, filled with such vengeance that the organization backtracked on the idea and announced that for now it would put it “on hold.”
A spokesperson for the Foundation – which is generally separate from the decentralized community of editors who upload their articles to the site – explained last week that in order to make the wikis “more accessible to readers worldwide with different content discovery projects,” the organization had planned to test “automatically generated but editor-moderated simple articles.” Like many other organizations that are filled with automated functions, the people who slowly build Wikipedia’s content were immediately enraged. The responses are worth reading.
“What the hell!? No, absolutely not,” said one editor. “No way. Not on any device or version. I don’t know how to qualify this senseless and stupid PR stunt.”
“That will destroy the accuracy reputation we have. People won’t read more than what the AI babbles to see what we really want to say,” said another.
“Don’t put AI in Wikipedia. That’s it. Those who make decisions in Wikipedia are looking to beef up their CVs with AI-related projects. Find a new employer,” one of the most vehemently expressed.
“A truly horrible idea,” someone else wrote. “Since all WMF proposals are followed despite what the real community says, I hope to at least see the survey and that it includes one or more options that we can respond to with a NO.”
“Are they trying to kill Wikipedia? Because that’s where they’re headed,” said one editor. “We’re trying to prevent AI from entering Wikipedia and we don’t want to be forced to accept it, telling us that we like it.”
The response
The forum is full of negative responses from editors who expressed their categorical rejection of the tool. Shortly after, the organization put the function on hold, as reported by .
“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring how to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to global readers,” a foundation spokesperson told . “This two-week opt-in experiment focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. To do this, the articles were generated using the open Aya model from Cohere. We wanted to generate interest in a feature like this and help us think about the type of moderation systems that would ensure that humans remain at the center of the decision of what information is displayed on Wikipedia.”
This article has been translated from Gizmodo US by Lucas Handley. you can find the original version.
