This is it, I think: Wikipedia is the fruit of conscientious, imaginative humans working for decades. AI is a couple of nanoseconds of pattern recognition pulled out a virtual arse. Wikipedia is free, AI has subscription tiers. Wikipedia is the opposite of AI - it's good, free, and works. - ThreadSky

lanceparkin.bsky.social • 5 days ago

This is it, I think: Wikipedia is the fruit of conscientious, imaginative humans working for decades. AI is a couple of nanoseconds of pattern recognition pulled out a virtual arse. Wikipedia is free, AI has subscription tiers. Wikipedia is the opposite of AI - it's good, free, and works.

Reposted from karl rove knausgård

I do genuinely wonder how many people think what happened with Wikipedia is that “society accepted it” rather than that they put a ton of work into making it reliable, something that is not going to make AI reliable because no technology to actually understand meaning has been or can be invented.

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voxvorago.bsky.social•5 days ago

This is also why a representative democracy is better than an automated bureaucracy: human review

artgirlsummer.bsky.social•5 days ago

Wikipedia is the modern incarnation of the printing press. AI is its antithesis. AI is anti knowledge, anti skill, anti human.

toffph.bsky.social•5 days ago

"the fruit of conscientious, imaginative humans working for decades" Very true, tho also of inclusionists & deletionists both working at cross purposes, of autobiographers, vandals, advertisers, bigots, propagandists, bots, and other bad actors. It's a mixed bag. Works... sometimes.

lanceparkin.bsky.social•5 days ago

Mostly harmless, yes.

lanceparkin.bsky.social•5 days ago

The Star Trek future looks like Wikipedia, not like the AI scam. But it's not the tech, it's the understanding that the human part of it is the whole point. Of course the people who think the point is to con people into overpaying see Wikipedia as a threat.

bleats.by86400.today•5 days ago

Also, at Wikipedia you can have some idea of provenance. You can see the citations and the changes and who made them, give or take

peculiarsusan.bsky.social•5 days ago

I’d take this guy’s courses at NYU (if that part of his bio is true) and let LLM do all the work. Just to see what grade I’d get.

inferknow.co•5 days ago

To be clear - you can use LLMs locally that are absolutely free, same as you can download the entirety of Wikipedia in archive form.

You don’t have the former without the latter, to your point, but AI is also a TON more than just LLMs so it’s an important distinction, imo.

isauragard.bsky.social•5 days ago

Oh good, a private, atomized delusion machine that can deliver bullshit to you in a manner totally cut off from any corrective mechanisms.

I guess that could be considered in the same breath as a snapshot of massive collective human achievement in compiled knowledge, but I'm not sure why.

lanceparkin.bsky.social•5 days ago

It is massively in the interest of AI scammers to pitch their thing as being in the same category as Wikipedia.

And it would be lovely if their potential investors and customers sat back and saw that, nah, they're opposites.

inferknow.co•5 days ago

I think they’ll just have their LLM “do what we do” and have it check the wiki page as context before marrying that to its internal pretraining and subsequent response. If you can eat ‘em, scrape em live.

Not agreeing with it but that’s the probable end game.

inferknow.co•5 days ago

I think that’s a pretty reductive and not-entirely-fair assessment of either technology, honestly.

I say this as a Wikimedia donor.

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