Comment Re:Bye bye Wikipedia (Score 3, Insightful) 12
Even on for authors, of encyclopedia articles, and this notihing wrong with telling ChatGTP to, "take this list of bullets and write it up as a paragraph."
Until it hallucinates and adds something that wasn't there or changes the meaning significantly. In my experience, AI is really good at screwing things up in ways that nobody expects. And if the people making the changes aren't subject-matter experts, but are just doing drive-by edits to try to make things more digestible, they might not notice the errors if they are subtle enough. Allowing any random person to do stuff like that could potentially cause a lot of damage really quickly.
Nor is there anything wrong with asking it to make a diagram of some process etc.
Until it steals the chart blatantly from somebody's published book, and Wikipedia gets sued for copyright infringement. Wikipedia isn't just trying to protect itself from erroneous data. It's trying to protect itself from liability. With user-uploaded content, the user can self-certify that they have the right to upload it, and apart from user incompetence, that's usually going to be good enough. With AI-generated images, it is impossible for a user to know for certain whether what they are uploading is infringing, and would be hard to later prove which AI generated the diagram to transfer the liability to the AI company.
But the biggest risk, IMO, would be asking it to make a chart with numbers from some table. It could manipulate the numbers, and if someone isn't checking closely, they might not see the error, but the incorrect chart could easily mislead people. AI-based chart generation seems way more likely to introduce errors than a human copying and pasting the table into a spreadsheet and generating the chart with traditional non-AI-based tools.
Someone else is going to clone wikipedia and the authorship will no doubt migrate to where they are allowed to use contemporary tooling.
And after a few months, people will complain that the content is constantly wrong, the editors over there will give up trying to keep the error rate under control, and anyone with a clue will come running back to Wikipedia.