AI Translations Are Adding 'Hallucinations' To Wikipedia Articles (404media.co)
- Reference: 0180916224
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/03/06/020239/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles
- Source link: https://www.404media.co/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles/
> Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they [1]discovered these AI translations added AI "hallucinations," or errors, to the resulting article . The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative AI across the internet from diminishing the reliability of the world's largest repository of knowledge. The incident also reveals how even well-intentioned efforts to expand Wikipedia are prone to errors when they rely on generative AI, and how they're remedied by Wikipedia's open governance model.
The issue centers around a program run by the [2]Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a nonprofit that was found to be "mostly relying on cheap labor from contractors in the Global South" to translate English Wikipedia articles into other languages. Some translators began using tools like Google Gemini and ChatGPT to speed up the process, but editors reviewing the work found numerous hallucinations, including factual errors, missing citations, and references to unrelated sources.
"Ultimately the editors decided to implement restrictions against OKA translators who make multiple errors, but not block OKA translation as a rule," reports 404 Media.
[1] https://www.404media.co/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles/
[2] https://oka.wiki/
They're catching up to us! (Score:1)
Wikipedia was about half hallucination anyway. Not like it's different just because it came from an LLM.
Re: (Score:3)
> Wikipedia was about half hallucination anyway.
Let's check that. Here is the link that takes you to a random Wikipedia article: [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
How many times do you have to click that link to find an example of the hallucinations that you claim are "about half" of Wikipedia?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Re: They're catching up to us! (Score:1)
I came here to say the same thing. Unless youâ(TM)re dealing with an article on physics, geography, or engineering, almost everything on Wikipedia has a noticeable slant. It is not limited to politics, it encompasses pretty much everything except the hard sciences.
Re: (Score:2)
> I came here to say the same thing. Unless youâ(TM)re dealing with an article on physics, geography, or engineering, almost everything on Wikipedia has a noticeable slant. It is not limited to politics, it encompasses pretty much everything except the hard sciences.
Apparently, we're supposed to fall in line with the bias and not supposed to point it out. For those of us that grew up with actual Encyclopedias, Wiki always comes off as a little iff-tacular. Like you say, in the harder sciences you tend to only get editors with a lot of training in the field, but most other topics? It's randomized edit-wars of counter-biases.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, well, reality has a well known liberal bias, so it can't be helped really.
WP editors are NOT known for using best practices (Score:4, Insightful)
Automated translation best practice: translate to the foreign language, then translate the output back through the bot into the starting language to confirm the translation. Wikipedia editors are NOT known for employing best practices.
Problem (Score:2)
It is crazy just HOW wrong and weird these "hallucinations" can be. Just last night I was asking Gemini about TV shows to watch and it literally made up a TV show that didn't exist as a recommendation.
Re: (Score:2)
"literally"
I think not.
Re: (Score:2)
A subtle, but fraught catch. If "literally" is translated as the personal experience "letter-ly" then I believe OP gets away with it.
Re: (Score:2)
Is "letterly" a cromulent word, though?
Re: (Score:2)
It metaphorically made up a show to a great extent??
What do you think is meant by "literally" here?
Hey, that's MY job (Score:2)
How dare AI still my job of adding inaccurate information to wikipedia articles for no reason.
Treat all AI edits as vandalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia is designed for humans to read, and is created by humans, AI editing is basically copy and pasting unreferenced slop, unlike humans that cite other human created text, AI just pulls out of its ass an alphabet soup of training data. AI is in fact worse than vandalism as at least vandalism is based on human creativity. If Wikipedia doesn't implement a 100% human contributions only policy, it will drown in slop. They should also lead by example and start mass deleting bot articles and rebuild them with human sources. Wikipedia should basically disable the paste button to non auto-confirmed users and only enable it once they have signed a human only declaration like you have to do at college now.