Today is not the day. Especially not regarding the verification.
Even subtle bias can manifest in significant ways. Given that the predominant market leaders in producing such models are currently : A country that's attempting to squeeze the word "america" in any geographic formation possible + rewriting history to put itself first, and a country that has perfected censorship en-mass and already actively doctors its own history.
I'm not convinced giving LLMs carte blanche to write authoritative sources on topics that - often are ideologically sensitive/controversial isn't just needlessly reckless and short-sighted. It's not a far reach to imagine such models reflecting the current views of administrations in these countries and becoming reluctant to mention certain colonial ambitions, environmental damage, political corruption in content with relevance.
Wikipedia already struggles with issues in idealogical bias from authors - human validation (somewhat)helps mitigate that. You could argue that human validation is still prone to same bias - but you can always draw on a more diverse pool of editors with little ideological overlap. With LLM validation you're pretty much at the mercy of a pretty incestuous pool of data & a handful of self-serving corporates & governments.
Funny though, as that admission of error makes it more reliable than if it tried to hide this fact.
I would rather be worried about the quality of all the primary and secondary sources going forward.
The hallucination era is rapidly ending.
What do you mean by this? I have passed very large documents into LLMs and they are able to accurately extract quotes and identify their location in the source documents. I don’t see any reason to think that they couldn’t accurately quote from and cite existing literature.
There are tools where they try to retroactively add references, the LLM interfaces try to do this, but it's usually inaccurate.
I think of the way a scientific article works. "The sky is blue (Pearson, 1992)." The writer is fully aware what the factual statement is and which publication supports it (not just that, but which kind of publication - primary, secondary source, peer reviewed?). An LLM can try to imitate this, but the actual information to support this does not exist in its training.
'Knowledge' formed this way is a living, evolving graph, and sometimes links are broken (findings are reevaluated or disproven); having the content declaration so clearly in the open makes it easier to deal with this evolving landscape.
"Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination (jgc.org)" 10.jun.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44239481 269 comments
"Wikipedia: Database Download (wikipedia.org)" 27.apr.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43811732 99 comments
"Low Background Steel (lowbackgroundsteel.ai)" 27.apr.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814531 2 comments
Now it's pages and pages and pages of text: probably factual, but not a satisfying read. It feels like it's for a different audience, and it's not satisfying to read.
Is it AI generated? I don't know for sure, but it feels like either someone (or something)'s missing the point of who Wikipedia's audience is; or that someone is following an agenda, (or that there's an edit war going on between dueling agendas and the facts are added to drown out the "AIDS is a consequence of bad morals" agenda.)
There's a pretty stark difference between the first few paragraphs of the HIV/AIDS page and the first few paragraphs of the Type 2 Diabetes page.
Both are "factual", but when I read the HIV/AIDS page, I feel like someone is trying to convince me "HIV is not a bad disease".
But now when AI does it, it's deemed bad? If it's factual and at all useful to someone, why not leave it? I feel like we're waging the same battles when Wikipedia became an open encyclopedia. Surely you need to control who can edit right? We all know how that ended.
There are over 7m articles in English Wikipedia.
AI doesn't even have a motive, it's just dumb - so you can't even track the mistakes to specific motivated users or networks of users. There's no way to clean it up.
Although I have to agree with you (probably, because I'm going to put words in your mouth) that this is a basic problem with wikipedia and how it is structured and governed, rather than a problem with AI. Anybody could always just put nonsense anywhere at any time; AI is just a chaos monkey. Wikipedia can't rely on groupthink to maintain itself, it has not worked and will not work, chaos monkeys are needed.
In worst case we might have an 'AI language' (or languages) instead, so the sensitive souls could find a safe heaven from it elsewhere, choosing something else. Perhaps one along the idea of 'simple English', have it 'AI English'. Or something else satisfies those looking for a specific way of delivery they can handle exclusively.
I think knowledge is the important here, not the tone.
Why write more than a book instead of just putting everything into one book?
This is a way of thinking from which it is hard to get out, I have no idea how to point it to you.
Honestly Wikipedia is just fine being written by humans. It's not the lack of copy that is holding Wikipedia back.
However,
> Perhaps one along the idea of 'simple English', have it 'AI English'.
That's actually an interesting idea. It could work, but I don't personally think it would be better than the English Wikipedia.
Also, are you expecting that humans would still be on the loop by deciding what gets added to AI English Wikipedia, or you think that LLMs should get to decide that too?
Many conservative worldview elements such as climate change denialism, creationism or anti LGBT view (e.g. LGBT being "unnatural") are not backed by reality because they run counter to scientifical consensus. And that's before we go into the outlandish bullshit conspiracy crap like "ZOG/zionist occupied government", "flat earth", "9/11 was faked", "the moon landing was faked" and the likes that gains more and more momentum among "conservative" people.
You cannot make a Wikipedia appealing to conservatives.
Not to mention this exact question is being discussed in the article.
Can't wikipedia ask who and it what way writes content on their pages?
Correct information written by AI vs incorrect, biased information written by humans?
What then, is the problem of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia?
> Fake or misleading citations have become a major worry.
Why is this not a standalone problem? Humans can fake and mislead in citations too, in fact, this is a major problem and has been so, for literally centuries in science.
> Being a place that was, in theory, free from AI slop has become part of Wikipedia’s identity.
Isn't this a separate issue in itself too? One of "quality". If AI generates poor quality content, than I would think the poor quality is the problem, not the producer of it.
The article mentions several times how hard it is to detect AI content. If it is that hard, then obviously AI is doing a good job and producing content that matches that of humans. Why then insist on one type of producer?