this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
105 points (80.0% liked)

News

22877 readers
5032 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

The world’s most important knowledge platform needs young editors to rescue it from chatbots – and its own tired practices

Established in 2001, Wikipedia is an “old man” by internet standards. But the role it plays in our collective knowledge of the world remains astonishing. Content from the free internet encyclopedia appears in everything from high-school term papers and pub trivia questions to search engine summaries and voice assistants. Tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT rely heavily on Wikipedia, although they rarely credit the site in their responses.

And therein lies the problem: as Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. When someone notices a topic that is poorly described on Wikipedia, they might feel motivated to correct it. But this can-do spirit goes away when the error comes through an AI summary, where the source of the information isn’t clear.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

No, but they can easily generate text that is statistically likely to look like a source.

LLMs are a probabilistic model of language, not an information source.

[–] newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I don't get it then, why are all these companies so gung-ho to replace something that was working with an AI that doesn't?
It's less accurate, it uses way more energy, it doesn't show its work, it doesn't cite its source, and it'll make up shit that sounds right when it needs to. Why would anyone think AI is worth putting in any consumer product at this rate?

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] JimmyBigSausage@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago

Because lazy-minded.

[–] newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Damn it I hate how simple and accurate this answer is.

[–] theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

As far as I can tell, it is hype because it is the hot new toy that they can sell.

LLMs are great for tasks like handling natural language data or classifying and identifying semantic meaning of text, but they are NOT good at math, logic, or as a store of facts/information. I think that they do actually deserve a lot of hype for these specific use cases, because they really accomplish these extraordinarily better than previous/traditional approaches.

The big problem is that they are being used for things that they are not good at, like when people ask a chatbot questions they they expect a factual answer to. They are also surprisingly bad at summarizing text (in my opinion and also this has been shown by some studies) despite companies like Google and Microsoft using them for things like summarizing and present search results. I think these companies are ultimately shooting themselves in the foot when they use LLMs for things that LLMs aren't great for.

Think back to when blockchain was being shoved into everything possible, even places where blockchain makes no sense. And before blockchain, it was cloud