For one month beginning on October 5, I ran an experiment: Every day, I asked ChatGPT 5 (more precisely, its “Extended Thinking” version) to find an error in “Today’s featured article”. In 28 of these 31 featured articles (90%), ChatGPT identified what I considered a valid error, often several. I have so far corrected 35 such errors.
Speaking very generally, it’s still conceding an amount of human intelligence and there are problems with it that are worth talking about, but it’s a use of AI that at least defers to human judgment, and as long as users are still personally researching and writing their own edits I honestly don’t hate it. Much.
it’s mostly outsourcing attention, which is pretty acceptable for a large project like wikipedia.
Right - I won’t call it a good thing to let people de-skill on reading comprehension skills, but they’re donating their labour to a public benefit! I’m hardly going to scold them as if I was their professor.
my thought is mainly that there aren’t enough hours in the day to read and check everything on wikipedia. there’s a reason the scots vandalism went unnoticed so long, people just don’t have the time.
That’s my main use for LLMs
- I write the code logic, the main argument points, etc
- let the LLM lint, format and structure the discussion
- I provide another round of copy editing, styling and other updates
personally i have separate linters, formatters and structure markers that don’t raise the temperature of my apartment when in use, but you do you.
I agree here and this goes back before ai. Any automated thing is fine with humans in the loop but once you take them out is when the trouble starts.
Most of the errors aren’t so bad, but it’s definitely nice to correct them.
You need to know Wikipedia’s system a bit though, because ChatGPT suggests these kind of things:
Want me to draft a crisp correction note you can paste on the article’s talk page?
Using LLMs when interacting with other editors is “strongly frowned upon”, and you can get banned if you refuse to stop. Especially if you are editing a lot of pages as you just discovered a lot of issues.
Using ChatGPT to “fix” Wikipedia, what could possibly go wrong? (/s as the approach seems valid, this is just a funny statement)
“I used the plagiarism engine to read the freely shared knowledge pool and it said it was wrong”
