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 threadJessamynMay 7, 2023
@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.
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 Kissane
@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
May 8, 2023 at 1:38amWeb