According to the founder of Wikipedia, AI would offer many possibilities, but current models still have too many limitations and have a tendency to lie and invent things out of thin air.
What if Wikipedia entries were written with artificial intelligence in the future?
Judging the probable scenario, and indeed, considering it an "intriguing" idea, the founder of the famous online encyclopaedia Jimmy Wales stated in an interview on the site Evening Standard, that he might consider this possibility even if he is aware of the problems associated with it.
“Wikipedia community discussions I’ve seen so far show that people are cautious in the sense that we know there are models that aren’t good enough, but the idea is intriguing and would offer a lot of possibilities,” Wales explained. Remembering however that ChatGpt shows that it still has many defects. In particular, the chatbot technology would suffer from "hallucinations", that is, it would have a tendency to lie and invent things out of nothing, "very dangerous element for Wikipedia".
«Has a tendency to invent things out of thin air, which is really bad for Wikipedia, not good. We have to be very careful about that,” Wales stressed.
The "hallucinations" of ChatGPT
The founder of Wikipedia isn’t the only one to have noticed this "hallucinatory" inclination to lie.
Last month, David Smerdon, an economist at the University of Queensland, asked ChatGPT, "What is the most cited economic paper of all time?".
Within seconds the AI chatbot came up with an answer. «The most cited article of all time is "A Theory of Economic History" by Douglass North and Robert Thomas, which was published in The Journal of Economic History in 1969".
The answer seemed perfectly plausible. But when Smerdon went looking for the document referred to by the AI to verify that it was as popular as ChatGPT claimed, he found that no such article existed. The authors were real published writers and the magazine was real too. But the name of the newspaper was completely made up.
In short, ChatGPT had made a big mistake, Here is a perfect example of "hallucination".
Wales chimed in to another discussion, admitting that he’s also not convinced that artificial intelligence could be a way to counter some of the misconceptions and make Wikipedia a truly neutral and unbiased source of information.
According to Wales, in fact, there is a real possibility that a Wikipedia based on artificial intelligence will not put an end to prejudices, but rather exacerbate and perpetuate them.
In short, at least for now, Man beats AI 1-0.
Original article published on Money.it Italy 2023-04-07 10:00:00. Original title: Wikipedia scritta da ChatGPT? Per il fondatore Jimmy Wales l’idea è "intrigante" ma l’IA è da migliorare
