Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. This also seems like a little ridiculous premise. Any confident statement about the real world is never fully reliable. If star trek were realistic the computer would have been wrong once in a while (preferably with dramatically disastrous consequences)—just as the humans it likely was built aro…
This feels like hyperbole to me. People can reasonably expect Wikipedia to have factual data even though it sometimes contains inaccuracies. Likewise if people are using ChatGPT for search it should be somewhat reliable. If I'm asking ChatGPT to put an itinerary together for a trip (OpenAI's suggestion, not mine), my expectation is that places on that itinerary exist. I can forgive them being closed or even out of bu…
I just straight-up don't agree with this, nor with the idea that what people consider "facts" are nearly as reliable as is implied. What we actually refer to via "fact" is "consensus". Truth is an apriori concept whereas we're discussing posteriori claims. Any "reasonable" ai would give an indication of degree of certainty, and there's no reliable or consensus-driven methodology to produce this manually, let alone automatically. The closest we come is the institution of "science" which can't even—as it stands—reliably address the vast majority of claims made about the world today.
And this is even before discussing the thorny topic of the ways in which language binds to reality, to which I refer you to Wittgenstein, a person likely far more intelligent and epistemologically honest than anyone influencing AI work today.
Yes, wikipedia does tend to cohere with reality, or at least it sometimes does in my experience. That observation is wildly different from an expectation that it does in the present or will in the future reflect reality. Futhermore it's not terribly difficult to find instances where it's blatantly not correct. For instance, I've been in a wikipedia war over whether or not the Soviet Union killed 20 million christians for being christians (spoiler: they did not, and this is in fact more people than died in camps or gulags over the entire history of the state). However, because there are theologists at accredited universities that have published this claim, presumably with a beef against the soviet union for whatever reason (presumably "anticommunism"), it's considered within the bounds of accuracy by wikipedia.
EDIT0: I'm not trying to claim wikipedia isn't useful; I read it every day and generally take what it says to be meaningful and vaguely accurate. but the idea that you should trust what you read on it seems ridiculous. As always, it's only as reliable as the sources it cites, which are only as reliable as the people and institutions that produce that cited work.
EDIT1: nice to see someone else from western mass on here; cheers. I grew up in the berkshires.
EDIT2: to add on to the child comment, wikipedia is occasionally so hilariously unreliable it makes the news. Eg https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...