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"As many as 5%" of new English Wikipedia articles "contain significant AI-generated content"

"In other words, the paper is a rather unsatisfactory read for those interested in the important question of whether generative AI threatens to overwhelm or at least degrade Wikipedia's quality control mechanisms - or whether these handle LLM-generated articles just fine alongside the existing never-ending stream of human-generated vandalism, hoaxes, or articles with missing or misleading references (see also our last issue, about an LLM-based system that generates gene articles with fewer such "hallucinated" references than human Wikipedia editors). Overall, while the paper's title boldly claims to show "The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia", it leaves it entirely unclear whether the text that Wikipedia readers actually read has become substantially more likely to be AI-generated. (Or, for that matter, the text that AI systems themselves read, considering that Wikipedia is an important training source for LLMs - i.e. whether the paper is evidence for concerns that "The ouroboros has begun".)

Secondly and more importantly, the reliability of AI content detection software - such as the two tools that the study's numerical results are based on - has been repeatedly questioned. To their credit, the authors are aware of these problems and try to address them. For example by combining the results of two different detectors, and by using a comparison dataset of articles created before the release of GPT-3.5 in March 2022 (which can be reasonably assumed to be virtually free of LLM-generated text). However, their method still leaves several questions unanswered that may well threaten the validity of the study's results overall."

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