Comment by bluebarbet
5 hours ago
Contrarian take: Wikipedia could use more AI, as well as less.
A major flaw of Wikipedia is that much of it is simply poorly written. Repetition and redundancy, ambiguity, illogical ordering of content, rambling sentences, opaque grammar. That should not be surprising. Writing clear prose is a skill that most people do not have, and Wikipedia articles are generally the fruit of collaboration without copy editors.
AI is perfectly suited to fixing this problem. I recently spent several hours rewriting a somewhat important article. I did not add or subtract information from the article, I simply made it clearer and more concise. I came away convinced that AI could have done as good a job - with supervision, of course - in a fraction of the time. AI-assisted copy-editing is not against Wikipedia rules. Yet as things stand, there are no built-in tools to facilitate it, doubtless because of the ambient suspicion of AI as a technology. We need to take a smarter approach.
> AI is perfectly suited to fixing this problem. I recently spent several hours rewriting a somewhat important article. I did not add or subtract information from the article, I simply made it clearer and more concise.
I'm confused by this. Is this written by an AI?
> Repetition and redundancy, ambiguity, illogical ordering of content, rambling sentences, opaque grammar.
This pile of words is missing a verb.
"You" (whoever that is, human or not) edited a single article, and that experience convinced you that "AI is perfectly suited to fixing this problem"?
Ironically, the lack of evidence to support such a strong assertion is one of the key problems with AI writing in general.
The idea that you could edit an article extensively without adding or subtracting information is facile. I would love to see this edit.
Hard to explain the hostility here. I simply outlined my opinion ("take") and backed it up with reasons. I have been a Wikipedia editor for well over 20 years. That should not be relevant to my argument.
> This pile of words is missing a verb.
And yet is completely understandable.
Strongly disagree. At least on English Wikipedia, articles tend to be high quality, and it's AI - not Wikipedia - that has repetition and redundancy.
AI isn’t one thing. The consumer AI bots (e.g. ChatGPT) are heavily dumbed down. Asking it a Wikipedia topic without prompting will of course produce low quality content.
With a good model , fine tuning & supervision AI can produce stellar content.
AI is at least a thousand tools. It’s a mistake to write it off so trivially.