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Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

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Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#11

Post by jcattle »

Antibabelic wrote: post #4

I found the page Wikipedia:Signs of AI Writing[1] very interesting and informative. It goes into a lot more detail than the typical "em-dashes" heuristic. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

An interesting observation from that page:

"Thus the highly specific "inventor of the first train-coupling device" might become "a revolutionary titan of industry." It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated."

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#13

Post by eurekin »

jcattle wrote: post #11
Antibabelic wrote: post #4

I found the page Wikipedia:Signs of AI Writing[1] very interesting and informative. It goes into a lot more detail than the typical "em-dashes" heuristic. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

An interesting observation from that page: "Thus the highly specific "inventor of the first train-coupling device" might become "a revolutionary titan of industry." It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated."

That's actually putting into words, what I couldn't, but felt similar. Spectacular quote

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#15

Post by robertjwebb »

jcattle wrote: post #11
Antibabelic wrote: post #4

I found the page Wikipedia:Signs of AI Writing[1] very interesting and informative. It goes into a lot more detail than the typical "em-dashes" heuristic. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

An interesting observation from that page: "Thus the highly specific "inventor of the first train-coupling device" might become "a revolutionary titan of industry." It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated."

The funny thing about this is that this also appears in bad human writing. We would be better off if vague statements like this were eliminated altogether, or replaced with less fantastical but verifiable statements. If this means that nothing of the article is left then we have killed two birds with one stone.

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#16

Post by bspammer »

jcattle wrote: post #11
Antibabelic wrote: post #4

I found the page Wikipedia:Signs of AI Writing[1] very interesting and informative. It goes into a lot more detail than the typical "em-dashes" heuristic. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

An interesting observation from that page: "Thus the highly specific "inventor of the first train-coupling device" might become "a revolutionary titan of industry." It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated."

That sounds like Flanderization to me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanderization

From my experience with LLMs that's a great observation.

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#17

Post by csande17 »

weli wrote: post #12

I don't see how this is going to work. 'It sounds like AI' is not a good metric whatsoever to remove content.

Wikipedia agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...

That's why they're cataloging specific traits that are common in AI-generated text, and only deleting if it either contains very obvious indicators that could never legitimately appear in a real article ("Absolutely! Here is an article written in the style of Wikipedia:") or violates other policies (like missing or incorrect citations).

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#18

Post by embedding-shape »

jcattle wrote: post #11
Antibabelic wrote: post #4

I found the page Wikipedia:Signs of AI Writing[1] very interesting and informative. It goes into a lot more detail than the typical "em-dashes" heuristic. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

An interesting observation from that page: "Thus the highly specific "inventor of the first train-coupling device" might become "a revolutionary titan of industry." It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated."

I think that's a general guideline to identify "propaganda", regardless of the source. I've seen people in person write such statements with their own hands/fingers, and I know many people who speak like that (shockingly, most of them are in management).

Lots of those points seems to get into the same idea which seems like a good balance. It's the language itself that is problematic, not how the text itself came to be, so makes sense to 100% target what language the text is.

Hopefully those guidelines make all text on Wikipedia better, not just LLM produced ones, because they seem like generally good guidelines even outside the context of LLMs.

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