Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions

https://infosec.pub/post/43865778

Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions - Infosec.Pub

Lemmy

First, editors can use LLMs to suggest refinements to their own writing, as long as the edits are checked for accuracy.

translation assistance

The former I’m still looking sideways at.

The latter, probably the only truly benevolent use of LLMs.

Eh I think this sounds ok. If you prompt an AI to improve your text, you submit that, and another human reviews that (and maybe asks you to make changes) it should be fine. I can see this giving more people the ability to make edits (e.g. non-native speakers)
The problem is, it doesn’t improve text, it worsens it. And if your grasp of the language isn’t good enough, you can edit a page in your own language, or ask nerds in the discussion section to help you, it will be better written, they will be happy, and you might learn something.
Asking a slop generator to generate some slop about what you wanted to write will make things worse.
This is a bit alarmist I think. It’s about how you use it. If your prompt is “please write a funny story about a bunny” you’ll get slop. If you write a full-ass Wikipedia article and ask it to simplify and punctuate long passages for increased legibility you can get valuable feedback.
If you can wrote a full-ass Wikipedia article you don’t need slopogen to smoother it into a paste of an average. You already wrote a full-ass Wikipedia article, good, done. Nerds from all over the world will fix your wording if it’s appropriate, that’s why it’s collaborative, that’s what made it good.
We all know it’s not how people use slopogen. People use it instead of thinking, instead of working, instead of writing. And if not banned completely, that’s what people will be doing with it, all the time, because people like to not spend any effort.

I find it really difficult to engage with this because it’s so obviously motivated by fear. And to be clear, there’s a lot to be afraid of with LLMs and generative AI, because the avenues for abuse are vast. However, the utility is also immense, and I really do find it an incredibly curiosity that to so many Lemmy users generative AI is just bad, as though it can’t really do anything properly.

We live in an age where China spits out cute propaganda cartoons about the Iran war almost in real time, at a much faster pace than South Park in its prime, and you can’t be a little bit amazed? Where the fuck is your sense of wonder, man?

And I get it, mediocre people use AI to do dumb shit and it’s infuriating, and evil corporations use it to compile kill lists, and if we let it take away our ability to write creatively, to compose new music, to write new code, then we atrophy perhaps the most important part of ourselves and we’ll live in a poorer world as a result. But that’s an us problem in the end, not a tech problem. If we want to avoid a future like that, we’ll have to accept the fact that LLMs are here to stay.