Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Google and AI

Moderators and executives clash on principles of data accuracy, integrity and commercialism. The effects of AI on the web are not simple to summarise, but here's a few insightful quotes from people spending a lot of time reviewing the transformation of today's web tools.

Reddit moderator for the r/hiking subreddit named Chris.

(ChatGPT) It gets facts wrong and ranks brands with a bigger web presence as more worthy.

If I were asked this same question I would give a completely different answer,” ... “Taking advice from AI will most likely result in hurt feet on the trail.”

Reddit on it's forum data being harvested to fuel ChatGPT LLM development.

Reddit founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

Stack Overflow's mods and users at different ends - quality or commercialism?

Like Reddit, Stack Overflow plans to charge firms that scrape its data while building its own AI tools — presumably to compete with them. The fight with its moderators is about the site’s standards and who gets to enforce them. The mods say AI output can’t be trusted, but execs say it’s worth the risk.

Google's foray into introducing Bard summaries before search results:

Avram Piltch, editor-in-chief of tech site Tom’s Hardware, highlights some of the problems. Piltch says Google’s new system is essentially a “plagiarism engine.” Its AI-generated summaries often copy text from websites word-for-word but place this content above source links, starving them of traffic.

Wikipedia on fact fabrication and the verifcation process

Wikipedia’s moderators are debating how to use newly capable AI language models to write articles for the site itself. They’re acutely aware of the problems associated with these systems, which fabricate facts and sources with misleading fluency, but know they offer clear advantages in terms of speed and scope. “The risk for Wikipedia is people could be lowering the quality by throwing in stuff that they haven’t checked,” Amy Bruckman, a professor of online communities and author of Should You Believe Wikipedia? told Motherboardrecently. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using it as a first draft, but every point has to be verified.”

Stack Overflow's battle with misinformation

This is the same complaint identified by Stack Overflow’s mods: that AI-generated misinformation is insidious because it’s often invisible.

Summary by author James Vincent at The Verge

Essentially, this is a battle over information — over who makes it, how you access it, and who gets paid. But just because the fight is familiar doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, nor does it guarantee the system that follows will be better than what we have now. The new web is struggling to be born, and the decisions we make now will shape how it grows.

Kia ora!