Why Jimmy Wales won't yet trust Al to write Wikipedia

Doubts: I think we’re still away from: ChatGPT, please write a Wikipedia entry about the Empire State building’” below) but don’t know how far away we are from that, certainly closer than would have thought two years ago”

- Simon Hunt

BY now, even those of us who live under a rock have become familiar with ChatGPT, the AI-powered bot that can find us the answer to almost every question under the sun.

The technology, developed by OpenAI, scours the net to piece together a vast corpus of human-made literature, and draws on this to find the answers to users' questions it thinks are most plausible.

But now imagine the roles are reversed. Instead of AI bots drawing on a body of human writing, imagine that in the future, much of the material we humans will read about will be written by AI.

Such a move could send shockwaves through the world of publishing, newsgathering and social media and it could be just around the corner.

It's a future that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is already spending a lot of time thinking about, as he weighs up how the world's biggest online encyclopaedia will evolve.

"In the Wikipedia community people are cautious in the sense that we're aware that the existing models are not good enough, but also intrigued because there seems like there's a lot of possibility here," Wales said.

"I think we're still a way away from: 'ChatGPT, please write a Wikipedia entry about the Empire State building', but I don't know how far away we are from that, certainly closer than I would have thought two years ago," he said.

Wales says that his own tests of the technology show there are still plenty of flaws.