In a recent interview with EuronewsNext, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales expressed harsh criticism of the current performance of ChatGPT. He pointed out that theThe popular artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed by OpenAI is "terrible" at writing Wikipedia articles because it often "is riddled with errors, makes mistakes in believable ways, and makes up sources.".
Wales even predicted,Superhuman AI may take at least 50 years to achieve. Although he believes that AI may surpass humans in the distant future, he believes that for now, AI tools are more likely to continue to support intellectual activities.
Despite criticism of current generative AI models, Wales did not rule out the possibility of AI being used on Wikipedia. He said it would help correct inaccuracies if a tool could be developed to spot errors in Wikipedia articles by comparing them to sources. He even told EuronewsNext that he would consider working with an open source AI company to develop a project that matches Wikipedia's principles, but he clarified that there are no concrete plans at the moment.
At the same time, Wales mentioned that such a decision would not be taken lightly. He said: "Most businesses, not just charities like ours, would say,If you're going to put a technology at the core of your business and that technology is controlled by someone else, you have to be very, very careful because if they go in a different direction, your entire business could be at risk. "
Wikipedia remains vital to generative AI as it provides information published online for AI to produce content. Therefore, this online encyclopedia must be accurate and unbiased, something both AI and Wikipedia have been accused of.
To create gender balance and combat disinformation, Wikipedia has its own army of "Wikipedians," mostly male volunteer editors. Wales said Wiki editors are able to distinguish fake sites and easily identify whether text was written by humans.
But the issue of bias is harder to solve because it may be historical; for example, there were fewer female scientists in the 19th century, and not much is written about them at the time, which means Wikipedians can't write much about them. Or it could be unconscious bias, like a 28-year-old tech-nerd Wikipedia user might have different interests than a 55-year-old mother.
Diversity is key in trying to combat bias, which is something the company is working towards.
Welsh said: "This is a real issue and obviously we feel a heavy responsibility,Because the world depends on Wikipedia, AI models also depend on Wikipedia. We don’t want to teach robots to be biased, we want to get the core human aspect of the whole thing right."