A neural network can identify references that are unlikely to support an article’s claims, and scour the web for better sources.

Should I believe this headline?

  •  salarua   ( @salarua@sopuli.xyz ) 
    99•4 months ago

    Wikipedian here - AI on Wikipedia is actually nothing new. we’ve had a machine learning model identify malicious edits since 2017, and Cluebot (an ML-powered anti-vandalism bot) has been around for even longer than that.

    even so, this is pretty exciting. from what i gather, this is a transformer model turned on its side; instead of taking textual data and transforming it, it checks to see if two pieces of textual data could reasonably be transformations of each other. used responsibly, this could really help knock out those [dubious] and [failed verification] tags en masse

    •  webghost0101   ( @webghost0101@sopuli.xyz ) English
      13•7 months ago

      you dont need dislexia for that but you are somewhat right that dilexia is an indication for certain intellectual skills.

      I bet you can easily adapt and read the following famous text:

      Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.[a][16]

      This text dating from 2003 is incorrect though, no such research was carried out by Cambridge. You can read more on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposed_letter_effect#Internet_meme

        •  webghost0101   ( @webghost0101@sopuli.xyz ) English
          3•7 months ago

          It does, dyslexia isn’t just a net negative were you make errors. Which may be a side effect of specific differently wired neurological intelligence.

          Being good at “Typoglycemia” isn’t exclusive to dyslexia for sure but statistically they have an advantage at the sort of thing.

          People with dyslexia can also have overlap with autism, adhd, ocd. Which is why they are considered part of the bigger neurodivergent family.

  •  Chozo   ( @Chozo@kbin.social ) 
    20•7 months ago

    This is good news. One problem I’ve always had with using Wikipedia as a research source is that while most of the claims may have citations, those citations will often point to dead links, or to pages that may have been updated/edited since the Wikipedia page was originally written and no longer back up the original claims. There’ve been numerous times I’ve seen multiple citations for a single claim on an article, and every single link the citations point to are either dead links or don’t actually say what the claim was, at all.

    Hopefully this helps to clear up a lot of that mess!

  •  Yote.zip   ( @yote_zip@pawb.social ) English
    13•7 months ago

    RE: “should I believe this headline?” I would say yeah this is a reasonable thing to use AI for. I assume they are not going to let it full-auto massacre all Wikipedia citations but as long as they have someone verifying the replacements that the AI is generating then this seems like a semi-auto way to clean up citations. My only worry would be that the AI would become a full replacement for finding sources, in which case people could just start accepting its suggestions as the best answers when manual searching could find a better source.

    The article does say it downranks low-quality sources, but I wonder how often you can type “what I want to be true” into it and have it find a source for nonsense.