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Comment by embedding-shape

12 hours ago

I think that's a general guideline to identify "propaganda", regardless of the source. I've seen people in person write such statements with their own hands/fingers, and I know many people who speak like that (shockingly, most of them are in management).

Lots of those points seems to get into the same idea which seems like a good balance. It's the language itself that is problematic, not how the text itself came to be, so makes sense to 100% target what language the text is.

Hopefully those guidelines make all text on Wikipedia better, not just LLM produced ones, because they seem like generally good guidelines even outside the context of LLMs.

Wikipedia already has very detailed guidelines on how text on Wikipedia should look, which address many of these problems.[1] For example, take a look at its advice on "puffery"[2]:

"Peacock example:

Bob Dylan is the defining figure of the 1960s counterculture and a brilliant songwriter.

Just the facts:

Dylan was included in Time's 100: The Most Important People of the Century, in which he was called "master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation". By the mid-1970s, his songs had been covered by hundreds of other artists."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Word...

  • Right, but unless you have a specific page about "This is how to treat AI texts", people will (if they haven't already) bombard you with "This text is so obviously AI written, do something" and by having a specific page to answer to those, you can just link that instead of general "Here's how text on Wikipedia should be" guidelines. Being more specific sometimes helps people understand better :)

A good place to see this pre-2022 (the ai epoch) is articles on less known bands from the late 2000s when Wikipedia was becoming more popular. Quite a few of them turn out to be copy/paste promo text. I know this because I did webdev work for that industry, and when I look up those bands on wikipedia I will recognize the text as text that I personally had to paste into a bio page 20 years ago. Since the bands are well known, nobody reports it (I admit I'm too lazy)

The real tell on those tends to be weirdly time-specific claims that tend to be wildly outdated ("currently touring with XYZ")