Some of the anti-AI stuff feels a bit like when people would say "don't use Wikipedia as a source." It's just like anything else, a piece of information that you weigh against multiple sources and your own understanding of its likely failure modes
Apr 26, 2025 13:23Will you go awry if you use it as ground truth? Yeah! But that's a horrible idea for any information source, not just AI
But AI isn’t an information source…
You still shouldn’t use Wikipedia as a source, unless you’re a middle-schooler.
The "information" it contains is the statistical likelihood of your input generating a particular output given what it was trained on. Because you cannot know its training or how its data applies to your transformation, the "information" content is also unknowable.
What its good at is not gathering or generating infirmation, but is hinted at in the name of the algorithm it's based on, the transformer. It's good at transforming language - a prompt into a reasonable looking answer, a description into an image, human language into computer instructions.
Me when I'm stupid
shut the fuck up
I bet it does feel like that to you, someone who is dumb.
wikipedia is put together by people who know information. AI is just throwing shit that kinda looks like information together. also, eat shit.
There's a substantial difference between contextualized information of Wikipedia (much of it sourced and edited) and decontextualized information dreamt up by the plagiarism machine. The latter may be incidentally right, occasionally (maybe even often), but it's not nearly as useful or reliable.
You’ve deservedly gotten roasted for this take but I just wanna pile on and say this is a terrible take.
With Wikipedia, 'A mentally unwell person made it all up' is a *worst* case scenario.
so-called "AI" generates statistically likely bullshit, that's all it will ever do, this is inherent to how it works and not something that can be iteratively improved away
It’s not a piece of information! It makes up facts. It plagiarizes. Fuck AI. Anyone who uses it should feel embarrassed.
The antis have already lost. They just come across as weird, angry luddites without any factories they can bomb.
wikipedia can’t use wikipedia as a source
As as longtime Wikipedian (and former employee in the Wikimedia Foundation's Communications team), I agree. A lot of the hate and bad press we got in the 2000s (and still sometimes more recently) was indeed similar.
The parallel don't just include hyperventilating about reliability, impact on students etc., but also e.g. "competes with copyright industry professionals and puts them out of their job" (we plausibly "killed" Brockhaus and various other paid reference works, by making knowledge accessible for free)
The "information" it contains is the statistical likelihood of your input generating a particular output given what it was trained on. Because you cannot know its training or how its data applies to your transformation, the "information" content is also unknowable.
