https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/magazine/wikipedia-ai-chatgpt.html
"In early 2021, a Wikipedia editor peered into the future and saw what looked
like a funnel cloud on the horizon: the rise of GPT-3, a precursor to the new
chatbots from OpenAI. When this editor — a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the
handle Barkeep49 on the site — gave the new technology a try, he could see that
it was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements (a false
name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual and coherent answers.
But he had no doubts about its potential. “I think A.I.’s day of writing a
high-quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later,” he wrote in
“Death of Wikipedia,” an essay that he posted under his handle on Wikipedia
itself. He speculated that a computerized model could, in time, displace his
beloved website and its human editors, just as Wikipedia had supplanted the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, which in 2012 announced it was discontinuing its
print publication.
Recently, when I asked this editor — he asked me to withhold his name because
Wikipedia editors can be the targets of abuse — if he still worried about his
encyclopedia’s fate, he told me that the newer versions made him more convinced
that ChatGPT was a threat. “It wouldn’t surprise me if things are fine for the
next three years,” he said of Wikipedia, “and then, all of a sudden, in Year 4
or 5, things drop off a cliff.”
Wikipedia marked its 22nd anniversary in January. It remains, in many ways, a
throwback to the Internet’s utopian early days, when experiments with open
collaboration — anyone can write and edit for Wikipedia — had yet to cede the
digital terrain to multibillion-dollar corporations and data miners,
advertising schemers and social-media propagandists. The goal of Wikipedia, as
its co-founder Jimmy Wales described it in 2004, was to create “a world in
which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all
human knowledge.” The following year, Wales also stated, “We help the internet
not suck.” Wikipedia now has versions in 334 languages and a total of more than
61 million articles. It consistently ranks among the world’s 10 most-visited
websites yet is alone among that select group (whose usual leaders are Google,
YouTube and Facebook) in eschewing the profit motive. Wikipedia does not run
ads, except when it seeks donations, and its contributors, who make about 345
edits per minute on the site, are not paid. In seeming to repudiate
capitalism’s imperatives, its success can seem surprising, even mystifying.
Some Wikipedians remark that their endeavor works in practice, but not in
theory."
Via Bill Daul.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
