#AI #Wikipedia #GenerativeA #ChatbotsI: "Wikipedia is no longer an encyclopedia, or at least not only an encyclopedia: Over the past decade it has become a kind of factual netting that holds the whole digital world together. The answers we get from searches on Google and Bing, or from Siri and Alexa — “How old is Joe Biden?” or “What is an ocean submersible?” — derive in part from Wikipedia’s data having been ingested into their knowledge banks. YouTube has also drawn on Wikipedia to counter misinformation.

The new A.I. chatbots have typically swallowed Wikipedia’s corpus, too. Embedded deep within their responses to queries is Wikipedia data and Wikipedia text, knowledge that has been compiled over years of painstaking work by human contributors. While estimates of its influence can vary, Wikipedia is probably the most important single source in the training of A.I. models. “Without Wikipedia, generative A.I. wouldn’t exist,” says Nicholas Vincent, who will be joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia this month and who has studied how Wikipedia helps support Google searches and other information businesses."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/magazine/wikipedia-ai-chatgpt.html