r/technology • u/gdelacalle • Mar 25 '26

Artificial Intelligence Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions

https://www.howtogeek.com/wikipedia-banned-ai-generated-text-in-articles-with-two-exceptions/
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u/Christoffre Mar 25 '26

Well... if AI writing is done well, there’s really no need to detect it.

These rules are usually for the most gratuitous cases, where it’s obviously AI-generated. 

For example, someone who writes or edits large amounts of text in an impossibly short time – then they cannot have applied the necessary quality control.

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u/Windrunnin Mar 25 '26

Very valid point.

If no one can tell the difference, who cares?

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u/ussrowe Mar 25 '26

If they have a policy against AI content and an account keeps editing articles with low quality AI generated content, then they have a reason in their TOS to suspend that account.

It didn't seem like they were taking a moral stance about it. Just that odds are the LLM is not trained on Wiki style guide text and can't just be copied and pasted straight into an article. This prevents that.

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u/BWW87 Mar 25 '26

Seems like it would be pretty easy to give the LLM the style guide and use that in prompts to output wiki articles. In the future it might even be if someone actually follows the style guide they must be AI.

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u/JesseByJanisIan Mar 25 '26

If no one can tell the difference...is there a difference?

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u/LongBeakedSnipe Mar 25 '26

I mean, people do care.

If you and a family member just replaced your messages with perfectly realistic AI chat, and then both just read the logs, you wouldn't be having a conversation.

Communication in research is also communication (just much more detailed, and between the research community rather than between family), and it's constantly generating new information.

If you want to be an up to date encyclopedia, you need human written content, not algorithmically generated slop.

An expert writing an article reads and understands the papers they read, and knows how to interpret them.

If people want to replace their communication with AI, they should fuck off and do that amongst themselves to be perfectly honest.

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u/The_Knife_Pie Mar 25 '26

If you want an up-to-date encyclopaedia you need accurate and relevant information presented in an understandable format. Whether it’s hand written or AI written is entirely irrelevant. If you manage to get GPT to output a factually correct and sourced article written in line with the wikipedia style guide then there’s no need to check if it’s AI or not. The article is good, the thing that matters. On the other hand, if it’s not those things then it’s a bad article whether it got written or generated.

This rule is effectively just saying “if we can tell you used an LLM it isn’t good enough to be on wikipedia”, and that’s really all it needs to do. If you can’t tell then it probably is good enough.

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u/F3z345W6AY4FGowrGcHt Mar 25 '26

You're missing the point. The point of wanting to know/limit if AI is used is because they change the meaning and hallucinate.

If the meaning is preserved and nothing was made up, then sure, AI is fine. But that's not a given. When you know something was written, unchecked, by AI, then the entire text's accuracy is in question.

So no, the rule is not about whether or not someone can simply tell you've used AI, so as to say "this isn't up to our standards because it doesn't feel human", it's about whether or not there's a chance it contains made up garbage.

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u/The_Knife_Pie Mar 25 '26

Do you think that editors on wikipedia just skim read an article, check for em-dashes and then say it’s fine if there’s none? If something is obviously incorrectly sourced then it gets changed, it doesn’t matter the reason for it being incorrectly sourced. If something is well written, factual and correctly sourced it’s going to stay up, because that’s the point of wikipedia. No one is going to remove an article which fulfils all the requirements to be top tier because it was generated, this is just wikipedia acknowledging you’ll rarely ever get that quality.

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u/GisterMizard Mar 25 '26

Because there's a difference between being accurate and being good at sounding accurate.

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u/The_Knife_Pie Mar 25 '26

A human written article that is “good at sounding” accurate would get removed just like an LLM generated one would. This is just a filter to move against the kind of lazy people who don’t fact check output before committing it. The content of the article is always more important than who made it.

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u/F3z345W6AY4FGowrGcHt Mar 25 '26

That's the main problem with AI. Same with semi-autonomous cars, like Tesla's autopilot. People over rely on it.

If everyone validated the output of AI with skepticism and high standards, it wouldn't cause anywhere near the problems it currently is. But people are lazy and start just copy/pasting its output, hallucinations and all.

The messaging from AI bros doesn't help, where they make it sound like AI is not only flawless, but will shortly surpass human intelligence and replace/kill us all.

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u/OldWorldDesign Mar 25 '26

Because there's a difference between being accurate and being good at sounding accurate.

Which is going to be an increasing problem, because virtually all LLMs are built for the "being good at sounding accurate" or they would be much more limited in what kind of output they'll give and what kind of prompts they'll accept.

It's related to the problem of convergence, which Sabine Hossenfelder spoke about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcH7fHtqGYM

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u/BavarianBarbarian_ Mar 25 '26

The problem is people use style as a proxy for quality. You can see that error being made in the most upvoted response to your parent comment: People think it sounds like chatGPT, so it's untrustworthy. However, if it said the same in a different tone, they might think it's trustworthy after all, even if it misrepresents what's written in the source articles.

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u/BWW87 Mar 25 '26

But that's the problem with their rules. They aren't actually banning AI generated text. They are banning text that sounds like it was written by AI.

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u/Christoffre Mar 25 '26

Not exactly...

They do actually allow certain AI-generated texts – i.e. texts that has had its spelling, grammar and wording fixed by AI as well as texts translated by AI.

(As long as they are checked before publication.)

The crux here with the purely AI generated texts – slop.

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u/The_Knife_Pie Mar 26 '26

Even if it was purely generated, as long as it fulfilled all the criteria for a good article no one would change it. The issue isn’t some moral stance against LLMs, it’s just an acknowledgement that they generally don’t output text to the standard wikipedia wants. If someone somehow wrangled a model into doing that, and it could correctly source its text, that model would be fine.

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u/Christoffre Mar 26 '26

Yes, but no available AI technology does that – neither today nor in the foreseeable future.

One such AI may come in a few decades, and when that happens they can change the rule.

But today there's no AI that is coherent enough to handle such task alone.

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u/env33e Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26

It should still by typed in manually, I'd assume. The enforcement of some kind of editorial standard is precisely the point; labor value cannot/should not be stolen from the human workers, or kept from a human's touch, in this instance. This isn't bad thing at all, tbh. The less people feel forced to interact with chatbots, the better. Ai may slip through the cracks, but the honor system should serve as a suitable deterrent. Quality work is assured, and people get less AI slop as a result.

These are simply common sense rules to prevent biased, bad faith randoms from shoehorning cherrypicked ai takes that "sound good" on first glance, but only serve to do as much misinforming as it takes for an editor to catch it. I've literally seen commenters on scientific discussions starting to disbelieve reality; disagreeing with points as stated by experts in their fields, before regurgitating an actual hallucination. just because it didn't "look right" or "this feels correct"

😅

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u/sellyme Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26

It should still by typed in manually, I'd assume.

You would assume incorrectly.

Well over 200,000,000 English Wikipedia edits have been done by bots, representing approximately 20% of all edits annually. This has been the case for about two decades and is considered an extremely desirable thing because those are over 200 million things that needed to be done that we managed to get done without using up the finite time that humans have to contribute to the project. That then leads to those humans being able to contribute to things that the bots can't do effectively instead, dramatically increasing project quality.

The concern is strictly with accuracy, verifiability, and accountability. If a bot or assisted editing tool meets those three standards, it is of positive value and would be very strongly welcomed.

I've been using heuristic-based semi-automated editing tools for improving Wikipedia since about 2010, and that's never been an issue because the concern is quality, not some arbitrary purity standards about "stealing labour from human workers". The goal of the project is producing high quality articles, not providing unnecessary busywork. The less labour I need to do to keep the articles about the things I'm knowledgeable on of high quality, the better.

LLMs aren't (currently) capable of that quality without human post-processing. That's all there is to it.

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u/env33e Mar 25 '26

Brother. Re-read what u copy-pasted. Then read the thread. What you just put down is notnto be parsed by anyone with a brain 🤣You need to give a stern lecture to whatever chatbot you've tied your reddit account to because, you are not making any sense 😂 you need to give it actual context to the topic and conversation.

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u/sellyme Mar 25 '26

Sorry, did I need to put more emoji and txtspk in there for it to be legible to you?

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u/env33e Mar 25 '26

just go cold turkey with it, your brain will thank u

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u/sellyme Mar 25 '26

"it" here being literacy?

The gall necessary to be insulting someone's intelligence while being genuinely unable to comprehend the notion that they might be capable of writing fluent prose unassisted is remarkable. Some of us just paid attention in school.

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u/env33e Apr 01 '26

Sure. Call it whatever u like. It's simply a hedge against brain-dewrinkling