Wikipedia’s Battle Against AI-Generated Misinformation

In the era of artificial intelligence, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is facing new challenges. With the rise of content generated by AI tools such as ChatGPT, the site’s community of volunteers is strengthening its control to prevent the spread of misinformation or promotional content.

There has always been a risk of fake articles appearing on Wikipedia. However, the advances in AI pose new challenges. The site’s committed community of 265,000 active volunteers has kept these problems under control. But the rise of AI-generated content is forcing the community to adapt.

Following the launch of ChatGPT, Wikipedia expanded its machine learning team. According to Jimmy Wales, the site’s co-founder, AI is both an opportunity and a threat.

“Wikipedia’s approach to AI has always been that people edit, improve and audit the work that AI does.

Miguel Ángel García, a Wikimedia Spain partner and former board member, admits that he has already come across texts that are suspected of having been generated with AI. “We have noticed that new editors appear who want to add content. And they add very extensive and highly developed content, which is unusual. Because when you are a volunteer starting out, you build the articles little by little. You go paragraph by paragraph.”

The Wikimedia Foundation, which controls Wikipedia, points out that since 2002 some volunteers have used AI tools, especially in redundant tasks. And the key to controlling inappropriate texts lies precisely in the community of volunteers, who moderate the content.

“In this new era of artificial intelligence, the strength of this human-led model of content moderation is more relevant. Wikipedia’s model, based on debate, consensus and strict rules for citing [sources], has proven resilient in maintaining content quality over the past two decades,” says Chris Albon, director of Machine Learning at the Wikimedia Foundation.

The battle against AI-generated misinformation

The biggest risk for Wikipedia comes from outside of Wikipedia. The platform relies on secondary sources. If volunteers detect that a site is unreliable, the community can decide to blacklist it.

There is another concern regarding the future of Wikipedia in the era of artificial intelligence. In a hypothetical scenario where chatbots, such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, resolve user queries with a summary, who will visit Wikipedia articles? And more importantly, who will edit them?

Conclusion

Connecting knowledge-rich sites to AI chatbots that extract and replicate it is also of general concern. “Without clear attribution and links to the original source from which information was obtained, AI applications risk introducing an unprecedented amount of misinformation into the world. Users will not be able to easily distinguish between accurate information and hallucinations.”