I feel like this is such a tragedy of the commons for the LLM providers. Wikipedia probably makes up a huge bulk of their dataset, why taint it? Would be interesting if there was some kind of "you shall not use our platform on Wikipedia" stance adopted.
I don't think Lockheed Martin or Raytheon are doing this, it's the awful pilots and intercept operators launching missiles into Palestinian homes. I don't think Rostec Corporation is doing this. It's only the grunts on the ground pressing the button sending heavy munitions into crowds of Ukranian civilians.
These mega corporations are entirely free from blame and you're gonna see to it none of us question their role, right?
> I don't think Lockheed Martin or Raytheon are doing this, it's the awful pilots and intercept operators launching missiles into Palestinian homes.
Missiles have a lot of legitimate and good uses. They sold to the only entity that can buy them, the government, then redistributed from there.
Missiles will be created because there is financial incentive to do so. If you really want to make the point you're trying to make, at least blame the people who create the financial incentive or the people giving orders. You've omitted the obvious most responsible party.
It’s a bad analogy. In this case Lockheed isn’t building a killer drone and then finding a market for it, nation states are sending requirements to Lockheed based on what they want to do. Hence the label “defense contractor.”
I think your analogy would hold if slop creators were creating requirements and contracting OpenAI to build the thing that lets them slop edit Wikipedia and GitHub issues. But since they aren’t, this is breaking the analogy.
You are still within the edit window to change up your analogy (but unfortunately not to completely delete your post), so you have a little time to make it coherent.
You’re not wrong at all, and I agree, but it was an analogy for someone who was comparing defense contracting companies with a regular saas company. In any case, for these purposes I don’t think we need to address all edge cases.
Wikipedia having incorrect citations is way older than LLMs. As many other people have pointed out in this thread, if you start pulling strings a lot of what people write starts falling apart.
Its not even unique to Wikipedia. Its really not difficult to find very misleading statements cited through a citation that doesn't even support the claim when you check the original.
This is like saying handing out machine guns is no big change because people have been shooting arrows for a long time. At some point volume becomes the story once it overwhelms the community’s ability to correct errors.
I wouldn’t be so quick to write Wikipedia off but I do think there will be changes. The SEO abusers might not have cost us editor anonymity but LLMs might push in the direction of needing real-world validation or friend of a friend referrals.
