"After months of heated debate and previous attempts to restrict the use of large language models on Wikipedia, on March 20 volunteer editors accepted a new policy that prohibits using them to create articles for the online encyclopedia.

“Text generated by large language models (LLMs) often violates several of Wikipedia's core content policies,” Wikipedia’s new policy states. “For this reason, the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited, save for the exceptions given below.”

The new policy, which was accepted in an overwhelming 40 to 2 vote among editors, allows editors to use LLMs to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing, which can be incorporated into the article or rewritten after human review if the LLM doesn’t generate entirely new content on its own.

“Caution is required, because LLMs can go beyond what you ask of them and change the meaning of the text such that it is not supported by the sources cited,” the policy states. “The use of LLMs to translate articles from another language's Wikipedia into the English Wikipedia must follow the guidance laid out at Wikipedia:LLM-assisted translation.”

I previously reported about editors using LLMs to translate Wikipedia articles and introducing errors to those articles in the process.

Wikipedia editor, Ilyas Lebleu, who goes by Chaotic Enby on Wikipedia and who proposed the guideline said that it seemed unlikely the policy will last because previously the editor community has been divided on the issue. However, Lebleu said “The mood was shifting, with holdouts of cautious optimism turning to genuine worry.”"

https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-bans-ai-generated-content/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Chatbots #Wikipedia

Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content

“In recent months, more and more administrative reports centered on LLM-related issues, and editors were being overwhelmed.”

404 Media

I find this rule extremely difficult - if not impossible - to enforce, given that:

1. LLMs are only getting better in terms of emulating human language.

2. There are lots of English native speakers whose writing was used for training these models, hence the false accusations made to people in Kenya and Nigeria of using LLMs to write stuff for them: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt.

3. Because of 1. and 2., the number of false positives will grow exponentially.

EXTRA:

4. There's no guarantee that the overall quality of an article will increase if written entirely by a human agent. On the contrary, when using three state-of-art models, the quality of an article can really increase, especially if the curator also has specialized knowledge of the area.

I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

I'm calm. I'm calm. I promise.

this man's mind
@remixtures it's a new rule for the English Wikipedia. The German Wikipedia did this decision already a while ago.
@duco @remixtures the Portuguese one in February 2025.