Erin KissaneMay 7, 2023

As someone who has participated in multi-year edit wars over, yes, Nazi shit, I will say that my biggest concern here isn’t about unedited LLM text hitting wikipedia articles—that’s v bad but probably largely fixable—but with the way Talk page sophistry is about to become absolutely fucking unmanageable as malicious editors set chatbots to do their infinite argumentation for them

To generalize: LLMs on the web’s surfaces are bad. LLMs in the backstage are much worse.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdba/ai-is-tearing-wikipedia-apart

AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart

Volunteers who maintain the digital encyclopedia are divided on how to deal with the rise of AI-generated content and misinformation.

Show threadJessamyn
@kissane Truth. One of Wikipedia's worst problems (and I say this as a pretty big fan most of the time) is the "endurance effect" where tedious arguing can stand in for actually having either support from others or an actual good point and this slowly bends Wikipedia towards survival of the ones with the most free time. I am curious to see how this goes, and vaguely concerned about it.
May 7, 2023 at 10:43pmWeb
Show threadEatonMay 7, 2023
@jessamyn @kissane same; it’s a big factor in many open source projects too, where cultural norms around “time contribution” being an inherently virtuous thing even frame it as a feature rather than a bug
Show threadArthur WyattMay 7, 2023
@eaton @jessamyn @kissane I’m pretty sure you could automate every single delete discussion to always produce a delete result just by throwing up random combinations of policy acronyms.
Show threadChristian KentMay 8, 2023
@eaton @jessamyn @kissane that’s … quite a general problem in civilisation as well though. Any form of politics bears that out. We have to build safeguards and Overton windows to protect ourselves.
Show threadTed Han ★ 韓聖安May 7, 2023
@jessamyn @kissane I find this stuff a much more plausible mechanism for disengagement from the open web and the Dark Forest theory (which I generally don't subscribe to) than fear of surveillance capitalism
Show threadErin KissaneMay 8, 2023
@ted @jessamyn yeah, I think player killers drive a lot more people out of open spaces than surveillance capitalism does, and chatbots have the potential to act as a multiplier there, I fear
Show threadThaiis Thei 𓁟May 7, 2023
@jessamyn @kissane This has been a problem for a decade. The only fix is a policy one but the inmates are running the asylum so I don't see that happening.
Show thread💡𝚂𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗍𝗆𝖺𝗇 𝙰𝗉𝗉𝗌📱May 8, 2023
@jessamyn @kissane
Yes, this is my experience as a reader on topics that I know about. Multiple times I've seen correct changes get backed out by an admin who didn't agree with it. In fact I went back there recently to show someone, and all reference to the issue had been removed altogether! As a Maths teacher there are things I could settle (textbook references), but what I've seen puts me off. I've always said Wikipedia is "like an encyclopedia" in the same way that Madonna is like a virgin.
Show thread💡𝚂𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗍𝗆𝖺𝗇 𝙰𝗉𝗉𝗌📱May 8, 2023
@jessamyn @kissane
For anyone who has the patience for any such edit wars, there's no such thing as "implicit multiplication" - only people who don't know the actual rules of Maths call it that. The correct name is The Distributive Law (also understanding of Terms is relevant here), law as in "must be obeyed at all times". i.e. not optional or ambiguous at all. Here's a couple of the memes I made (one includes one of many textbook references on the topic)...