chaotic enby
My #Wikipedia request for comment just closed, finally banning #AI content in articles! "The use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited"
Kudos to all who participated in writing the guideline (especially Kowal2701) and the whole WikiProject AI Cleanup team, this was very much a group effort!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC
chaotic enby
My genuine hope is that this can spark a broader change. Empower communities on other platforms, and see this become a grassroots movement of users deciding whether AI should be welcome in their communities, and to what extent. On their own terms.
A pushback against the #enshittification and forceful push of AI by so many companies in these last few years.
yoasif
@quarknova I think that unfortunately, this policy is exactly what big tech wants - fresh training knowledge and training data from humans, which the tech companies are free to remix into new public domain works that are not protected by share-alike.
With this policy, Wikipedia demands that humans work for the bots for free, and the humans can't even take advantage of the bots to work against the theft of the commons.
Rich Felker
@yoasif @quarknova You have no idea what you're talking about. There is no way for humans to "take advantage of the bots to work against the theft of the commons". Slop-spewing bots cannot magically create new knowledge of the real world. All they can do is remix things that were already written and scooped up into their training set to make something that sounds plausible but that has no provenance.
yoasif
@dalias @quarknova I don't actually believe that the bots can generate knowledge, but that is what we are told.
The lie is revealed with the demand for real human knowledge.
It isn't "malevolent capitalists" -- it is Wikipedia that has sold out its community: https://www.avclub.com/wikipedia-ai-partnerships-meta-amazon-microsoft
If it is good for the goose, why isn't good enough for the gander?
More precisely, why continue to contribute to Wikipedia when they have preemptively sold out the commons?
Rich Felker
@yoasif @quarknova That was a mistake, for complex reasons. But it doesn't justify burning down commons that you don't have the means to replicate outside of the organization at present.
Rich Felker
@yoasif @quarknova Even if you don't want to contribute to Wikipedia for these reasons (completely legitimate), you should want it not to be burned to the ground by LLM slop in the absence of any viable fork to replace it. The policy banning LLM slop benefits us all by preserving a commons that was built before the very unfortunately and shortsighted choice the org made.
yoasif
@dalias @quarknova I mean, forks could exist.
Forks wouldn't have a deal for big tech to opt out of share-alike, so we could conceivably see better stewards for this repository of knowledge than the Jimmy Wales crew.
As it is, contributing directly to Wikipedia constitutes a tacit acknowledgement of a rejection of the license that your contributions are nominally contributed under; Wikipedia has opted you out, even if you haven't.
Rich Felker
@yoasif @quarknova We are not talking about contributing. We are talking about having access to a vast amount of information that has never before existed in one place available to anyone in human history, or letting it be overrun and destroyed by LLM-worshipping vandals. If you don't think the policy to keep the vandals out is a good thing because you're pissed off about what the bad stewards of it all did, and you just want to see it all burn, I don't really think I have anything else to say to you.
yoasif
@dalias @quarknova I agree - I am simply trying to make people aware of the fact that your contributions are no longer protected by share-alike when contributing to Wikipedia, since Wikipedia has opted you out.
If you don't think your contributions should be helping drive the slop that we all bemoan, it is probably a good idea to not continue to fund it for free.
Big Tech can hire people to edit a Wikipedia-like corpus that could conceivably better than Wikipedia; they've got the money.
yoasif
@dalias @quarknova I don't agree that the commons is preserved, FWIW - I think continuing to contribute acknowledges that your contributions are given as a kind of dual-license - share-alike for the commons, proprietary (and paid for) for big tech.
Downstream from that, since the license is ignored when the trained LLMs output the contributions as public domain, you have preserved the contribution in a very different way than intended -- kind of a monkey paw effect.
Rich Felker
@yoasif @quarknova The thread you replied into is about successfully getting a no-slop policy adopted.
yoasif
@dalias @quarknova I'm talking about contributing - this whole thread is about contributing.
If you are talking about something else, I'm happy to discontinue discussing.
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