One concern I have is that all “oldbies” like myself have all seen bots basically decay after whomever is maintaining goes inactive. Of course, this could be mostly rectified by having the AI be open source. This leaves the “people” aspect; that is, not only does the AI need to be maintained, but interest needs to be maintained as well.

From,

I dream of horses

She/her

On Dec 30, 2022, at 8:53 AM, Victoria Coleman <vstavridoucoleman@gmail.com> wrote:

Anne,

Interestingly enough what these large companies have to spend a ton of money on is creating and moderating content. In other words people. Passionate volunteers in large numbers is what the movement has in abundance. Imagine the power of combining the talents and passion of our community members with the advances offered by AI today. I was struck recently during a visit to NVIDIA how language models have changed. Back in my day, we would have to build one language model per domain and then load it in to the device, a computer or a phone, to  use. Now they have one massive combined language model in a data center full of their GPUs which is there so long as you are connected. My sense is that within the guard rails offered by our volunteer community, we could use AI to force multiply their efforts and make knowledge even more accessible than it is today.  Both for those who create and record knowledge as well as those who consume it. In the case of Chat GPT, our volunteers could use supervised learning for example to narrow down the mistakes the bot makes - which should be many fewer that the Open AI version since the Wikipedia version would be trained on good, clean Wikipedia content which is constantly reviewed by the community. 

Best regards,

Victoria Coleman

On Dec 30, 2022, at 12:21 AM, Risker <risker.wp@gmail.com> wrote:



Given what we already know about AI-like projects (think Siri, Alexis, etc), they're the result of work done by organizations utilizing resources hundreds of times greater than the resources within the entire Wikimedia movement, and they'renot all that good if we're being honest.  They're entirely dependent on existing resources.  We have seen time and again how easily they can be led astray; ChatGPT is just the most recent example.  It is full of misinformation.  Other efforts have resulted in the AI becoming radicalized.  Again, it's all about what sources the AI project uses in developing its responses, and those underlying sources are generally completely unknown to the person asking for the information. 

Ironically, our volunteers have created software that learns pretty effectively (ORES, several anti-vandalism "bots").  The tough part is ensuring that there is continued, long-term support for these volunteer-led efforts, and the ability to make them effective on projects using other languages. We've had bots making translations of formulaic articles from one language to another for years; again, they depend on volunteers who can maintain and support those bots, and ensure continued quality of translation.

AI development is tough. It is monumentally expensive. Big players have invested billions USD trying to develop working AI, with some of the most talented programmers and developers in the world, and they're barely scratching the surface.  I don't see this as a priority for the Wikimedia movement, which achieves considerably higher quality with volunteers following a fairly simple rule set that the volunteers themselves develop based on tried and tested knowledge.  Let's let those with lots of money keep working to develop something that is useful, and then we can start seeing if it can become feasible for our use.

 I envision the AI industry being similar to the computer hardware industry. My first computer cost about the same (in 2022 dollars) as the four computers and all their peripherals that I have within my reach as I write this, and had less than 1% of the computing power of each of them.[1]  The cost will go down once the technology gets better and more stable. 

Risker/Anne

[1] Comparison of 1990 to 2022 dollars.

On Fri, 30 Dec 2022 at 01:40, Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

just to remark that it superficially looks like a great tool for small language Wikipedias (for which the translation tool is typically not available). One can train the tool in some less common language using the dictionary and some texts, and then let it fill the project with a thousands of articles. (As an aside, in fact, one probably can train it to the soon-to-be-extint languages and save them until the moment there is any interest for revival, but nobody seems to be interested). However, there is a high potential for abuse, as I can imagine people not speaking the language running the tool and creating thousands of substandard articles - we have seen this done manually, and I would be very cautious allowing this.

Best

Yaroslav

On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 4:57 AM Raymond Leonard <raymond.f.leonard.jr@gmail.com> wrote:

As a friend wrote on a Slack thread about the topic, "ChatGPT can produce results that appear stunningly intelligent, and there are things that I’ve seen that really leave me scratching my head- “how on Earth did it DO that?!?”  But it’s important to remember that it isn’t actually intelligent.  It’s not “thinking.”  It’s more of a glorified version of autosuggest.  When it apologizes, it’s not really apologizing, it’s just finding text that fits the self description it was fed and that looks related to what you fed it."

The person initiating the thread had asked ChatGPT "What are the 5 biggest intentional communities on each continent?" (As an aside, this was as challenging as the question that led to Wikidata, "What are the ten largest cities in the world that have women mayors?") One of the answers ChatGPT gave for Europe was "Ikaria (Greece)". As near as I can determine, there is no intentional community of any size in Ikaria. However, the Icarians were a 19th-century intentional community in the US founded by French expatriates. It was named after a utopian novel, Voyage en Icarie, that was written by Étienne Cabet. He chose the Greek island of Icaria as the setting of his utopian vision. Interesting that ChatGPT may have conflated these.

It seems that given a prompt, ChatGPT shuffles & regurgitates facts. Just as a card dealer deals a good hand, sometimes ChatGPT seems to make sense, but I think at present it really is " a glorified version of autosuggest."

Yours

Peaceray

On Thu, Dec 29, 2022 at 6:39 PM Gnangarra <gnangarra@gmail.com> wrote:

I think the simplest answer is yes its an artificial writer but its not intelligence as the name implies but rather just a piece of software that gives answers according to the methodology of that software. The garbage in garbage out format, it can never be better than the programmers behind the machine

On Fri, 30 Dec 2022 at 09:56, Victoria Coleman <vstavridoucoleman@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you Ziko and Steven for the thoughtful responses.

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…

Best regards,

Victoria Coleman

On Dec 29, 2022, at 5:17 PM, Steven Walling <steven.walling@gmail.com> wrote:



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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