1: AI is hallucinating events, historical figures, entire concepts on Wikipedia

2: a task force of Wikipedia editors is detecting and deleting this stuff

https://www.404media.co/the-editors-protecting-wikipedia-from-ai-hoaxes/

@jasonkoebler such an irritating (& by appearances kind of obtuse?) “flood the zone with shit” maneuver

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jasonkoebler/113277695930067862

Wikipedia is perhaps the greatest cross cultural cooperative collaboration in the history of humankind and it is getting fucked up with AI and is taxing the volunteer editors who are already spread thin with bullshit like this:

I shouldnt have used the word “hallucinating” in the initial post - ppl using AI are fucking up wiki with fake stuff they generated with AI or they are maybe earnestly trying to contribute but are using AI which is getting stuff wrong but I didn’t have enough characters to explain all that. AFAIK AI agents aren’t automatically contributing to Wikipedia at this juncture. But if they are pls let us know

@jasonkoebler This was already a problem before AI came into the picture. AI is just spreading the problem more efficiently.

@jasonkoebler I used to think making up stories was fun until computers weaponized it.

@jasonkoebler You could replace the words "Wikipedia” with "The World Wide Web” and the same thing would be broadly true.

Except that the degradation of the web from something that could be useful to everyone into a seething cesspit of spam, hatred and disinformation began well before generative AI arrived to accelerate the job.

@jasonkoebler @cstross And that is why we can't have nice things (cf environment, climate, food and health for all…): enshitification.

@jasonkoebler I would almost have pity for Wikipedia except it doesn’t have a strong stance on AI sludge. Rather to the contrary, it allows leveraging so-called "AI" when contributing and is only removing these on quality grounds.

@jasonkoebler Oh that’s fun: destroy our habitat and drink all our water to spew bullshit that humans then have to clean-up.

Capitalism, you’re doing amazing, sweetie!

@jasonkoebler I get so bugged when folks adopt the phony anthropomorphized lingo proffered by the AI marketers. To say "AI hallucinates" basically helps sell more AI. How about, "pseudo-random chat-bot spews useless and damaging pseudo-random nonsense"?