My sense is that for a class for readers having a generative UI that returns an answer VS an article would be useful. It would probably put Quora out of business. :-)

If the models are not open source, this indeed would require developing our own models. For that kind of investment, we would probably want to have more application areas. Translation being one that Ziko already pointed out but also summarization. These kinds of Information retrieval queries would effectively index into specific parts of an article vs returning the whole thing.

Wikipedia as we all know is not perfect but it’s about the best you can get with the thousands of editors and reviewers doing quality control. If a bot was exclusively trained on Wikipedia, my guess is that the falsehood generation would be as minimal as it can get. Garbage in garbage out in all these models. Good stuff in good stuff out. I guess the falsehoods can also come when no material exists in the model. So instead of making stuff up, they could default to “I don’t know the answer to that”. Or in our case, we could add the topic to the list of article suggestions to editors…

I know I am almost day dreaming here but I can’t help but think that all the recent advances in AI could create significantly broader free knowledge pathways for every human being. And I don’t see us getting after them aggressively enough…



On Thu, Dec 29, 2022 at 4:09 PM Victoria Coleman <vstavridoucoleman@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone. I have seen some of the reactions to the narratives generated by Chat GPT. There is an obvious question (to me at least) as to whether a Wikipedia chat bot would be a legitimate UI for some users. To that end, I would have hoped that it would have been developed by the WMF but the Foundation has historically massively underinvested in AI. That said, and assuming that GPT Open source licensing is compatible with the movement norms, should the WMF include that UI in the product?

This is a cool idea but what would the goals of developing a Wikipedia-specific generative AI be? IMO it would be nice to have a natural language search right in Wikipedia that could return factual answers not just links to our (often too long) articles.

OpenAI models aren’t open source btw. Some of the products are free to use right now, but their business model is to charge for API use etc. so including it directly in Wikipedia is pretty much a non-starter. 

My other question is around the corpus that Open AI is using to train the bot. It is creating very fluid narratives that are massively false in many cases. Are they training on Wikipedia? Something else?

They’re almost certainly using Wikipedia. The answer from ChatGPT is: 

“ChatGPT is a chatbot model developed by OpenAI. It was trained on a dataset of human-generated text, including data from a variety of sources such as books, articles, and websites. It is possible that some of the data used to train ChatGPT may have come from Wikipedia, as Wikipedia is a widely-used source of information and is likely to be included in many datasets of human-generated text.”

And to my earlier question, if GPT were to be trained on Wikipedia exclusively would that help abate the false narratives

Who knows but we would have to develop our own models to test this idea. 

This is a significant matter for the  community and seeing us step to it would be very encouraging.

Best regards,

Victoria Coleman
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