Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content
spectrum.ieee.org467 points by rbanffy 18 hours ago
467 points by rbanffy 18 hours ago
Almost all of these websites or platforms are doing these massive cleanup to remove ai content from them. Well appreciated.
I think they have to; while at first glance AI generated content is impressive, it becomes noisy and sameish at larger scale or the more you read it. I'm of the opinion that AI is here to stay and a valuable tool for many use cases, but writing authoritative content ain't it. Wikipedia is fighting it (and other influences from before AI, like unsubstantiated claims and whatnot), I hope the scientific community and journalism steps up too.
Wikipedia is also a training source and shouldn’t also be a model output for content. Eventually it will be an oroborus, but it seems prudent to avoid that for as long as possible.
A little over a year ago, the MIT Technology Review ran a piece about how outputting AI content to non-English Wikipedia is rapidly corrupting the primary training data for uncommon languages because of exactly this process: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikip...
It's funny to think that pre-LLM archives are the new low-background steel.
Ironically. Wikipedia already links that concept to low-background steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel#Cultural_...
Krazam has a video about that.
"Rare Data Hunters"[1]? Man, the production quality went through the roof on his newest stuff.
It certainly may place a very high value on archive.org over time thanks to their historical timestamping
Hence all the AI labs buying up and destroying physical books. Even "yellow press" stuff, pulp fiction, dime novels and whatnot "low quality" literature are a valuable source of how actual humans write.
I wouldn't even have much of a problem with it - if these labs would be fair enough to humanity as a whole to provide the raw scans after the process is completed, and if they would limit themselves to books that have been on the market for more than 20 years.
> if these labs would be fair enough to humanity as a whole to provide the raw scans after the process is completed
Unfortunately, this would get them an even bigger copyright smackdown than they've already received.
And destroying!?
What do you think bookstores do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_book
> A stripped book is a mass market paperback that has been stripped of its cover in order to be recycled. The covers are returned to the publisher as evidence that the books have been destroyed and to obtain a credit on the purchase price.[1] The books are meant to be destroyed by pulping but some find their way to street merchants, sometimes by illegal means, and are resold.[2]
I grew up reading books with this ditty in them:
> If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Those books certainly weren't scanned before being pulped. Would've been illegal. Really, the big thing that destroys books is the copyright term being as long as it is.
AI companies weren't buying up tons of unsold mass-market materials, and I think it's disingenuous to even make the comparison.
What was going on recently was AI companies were specifically seeking out rare — or sometimes irreplaceable — books to supplement their data sets (and hopefully getting a leg up on their competitors). The destruction of the books wasn't the point, it was just a consequence of the business-oriented realization that they could scan the contents of more books faster if they just chopped off the bindings rather than investing the time to care for the books and keep them intact (plus supposedly playing along with copyright law by "only having one copy of the copyrighted material").
From my understanding, they are legally obligated to in this case.
The Holy Inquisition was also required to burn witches in the medieval era.
That does not really make it a law though.