Jimmy Wales May Use OpenAI's ChatGPT to Write Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has expressed interest in using OpenAI's ChatGPT to write new entries for the online encyclopedia, as reported first by New Atlas.

In an interview with the Evening Standard newspaper in London, Wales acknowledged the potential for AI to triple the number of Wikipedia entries without significantly increasing running costs.

One possible use case would be to use the large language model to identify inconsistencies in existing articles that human volunteers could then address.

Tendency to 'Hallucinate'

While Wales is enthusiastic about the potential of AI to improve Wikipedia, he is also aware of the challenges inherent in using language models like GPT. He notes that AI has a tendency to "hallucinate" or create false information, which is a serious concern for an online encyclopedia that prides itself on accuracy.

Wales acknowledges that AI-generated content must be closely monitored to prevent misinformation from being disseminated.

One possible solution to this problem is to use AI to create summary entries for topics that have not yet been covered on Wikipedia.

By using information from the web, ChatGPT could fill in gaps in the encyclopedia's coverage without relying on inaccurate or false information.

Wikipedia is written and maintained by volunteers, a majority of whom are white males, leading to the tendency to ignore certain topics or cover them from a limited perspective.

While ChatGPT attempts to provide a balanced perspective, it also has inherent bias problems in its training data, as noted by New Atlas.

Wales acknowledges that the technology is not yet advanced enough for ChatGPT to write an entire Wikipedia entry. However, he believes that it may be closer than he thought two years ago.

He cautions that using AI to expand the resource could help with or exacerbate systemic and unconscious bias, and it is important to ensure that any AI-based system does not worsen existing problems.

"I do think there are some interesting opportunities for human assistance where if you had an AI that was trained on the right corpus of things - to say, for example, here are two Wikipedia entries, check them and see if there are any statements that contradict each other and identify tensions where one article seems to be saying something slightly different to the other," Wales said in a statement with Evening Standard.