Perhaps this is not the best idea in utilizing AI’s capabilities: as reported by 404 Media, Wikimedia Foundation (owners of Wikipedia) tested AI-generated summaries for its articles earlier this month, only to face significant pushbacks from its editors resulting in an almost immediate pause after just one day of trial.
Wikipedia AI Experiment Gone Wrong
“Yuck,” that’s the first and second reply of editors in the span of mere hours responding to Wikipedia’s initial announcement of that feature, so you can probably see where this is going. For some context, the announcement proposes an AI-generated but editor-moderated summary for readers to easily go through long articles (and it’ll be presented as an opt-in). The trial was originally set to run for two weeks on the mobile website available to 10% of the readers.
The sentiment of various editors indicate a general disdain towards existing AI-generated summaries, such as the ones aggressively introduced by Google or Bing. One editor wrote: “Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn’t mean we need to one-up them. I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else. This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source.”
Another editor’s comment is quite damning: “Let’s not insult our readers’ intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries.” The worries of Wikipedia editors aren’t unfounded, as there are several documented cases of AI-generated answers “hallucinating” with ridiculous answers, including one instructing users to add glue to the pizza. In this case, this was a result of scrapped Reddit comment originally intended as a joke, but AI makes little to no distinctions to such; we humans do.
If simplification is the goal, this decision seems a tad confusing given that Wikipedia already has one such “language” for simplified content: Simple English. (In theory, nothing stops editors from building similar versions in other languages too, all without AI’s involvement.) Regardless, Wikimedia Foundation told 404 Media that it’s not ruling out this idea for now, though it “[does] not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement.”
Pokdepinion: Like, Simple English exists? Why?
