Relax, this is not the doom and gloom some of y'all think this is and that is pretty telling.

It really depends on what you're looking at. The history section of some random town? Absolutely bog-standard prose. I'm probably missing lots of implications as I'm no historian but at least I understand what's going on. The article on asymmetric relations? Good luck getting your mathematical literacy from wikipedia all the maths articles require you to already have it, and that's one of the easier ones. It's a fucking trivial concept, it has a glaringly obvious example... which is mentioned, even as first example, but by that time most people's eyes have glazed over. "Asymmetric relations are a generalisation of the idea that if a < b, then it is necessarily false that a > b: If it is true that Bob is taller than Tom, then it is false that Tom is taller than Bob." Put that in the header.

Or let's take Big O notation. Short overview, formal definition, examples... not practical, but theoretical, then infinitesimal asymptotics, which is deep into the weeds. You know what that article actually needs? After the short overview, have an intuitive/hand-wavy definition, then two well explained "find an entry in a telephone book", examples, two different algorithms: O(n) (naive) and O(log n) (divide and conquer), to demonstrate the kind of differences the notation is supposed to highlight. Then, with the basics out of the way, one to demonstrate that the notation doesn't care about multiplicative factors, what it (deliberately) sweeps under the rug. Short blurb about why that's warranted in practice. Then, directly afterwards, the "orders of common functions" table but make sure to have examples that people actually might be acquainted with. Then talk about amortisation, and how you don't always use hash tables "because they're O(1) and trees are not". Then get into the formal stuff, that is, the current article.

And, no, LLMs will be of absolutely no help doing that. What wikipedia needs is a didactics task force giving specialist editors a slap on the wrist because xkcd 2501.

It's kind of indirectly related, but adding a query parameter udm=14 to the url of your Google searches removes the AI summary at the top, and there are plugins for Firefox that do this for you. My hopes for this WM project are that similar plugins will be possible for Wikipedia.

The annoying thing about these summaries is that even for someone who cares about the truth, and gathering actual information, rather than the fancy autocomplete word salad that LLMs generate, it is easy to "fall for it" and end up reading the LLM summary. Usually I catch myself, but I often end up wasting some time reading the summary. Recently the non-information was so egregiously wrong (it called a certain city in Israel non-apartheid), that I ended up installing the udm 14 plugin.

In general, I think the only use cases for fancy autocomplete are where you have a way to verify the answer. For example, if you need to write an email and can't quite find the words, if an LLM generates something, you will be able to tell whether it conveys what you're trying to say by reading it. Or in case of writing code, if you've written a bunch of tests beforehand expressing what the code needs to do, you can run those on the code the LLM generates and see if it works (if there's a Dijkstra quote that comes to your mind reading this: high five, I'm thinking the same thing).

I think it can be argued that Wikipedia articles satisfy this criterion. All you need to do to verify the summary is read the article. Will people do this? I can only speak for myself, and I know that, despite my best intentions, sometimes I won't. If that's anything to go by, I think these summaries will make the world a worse place.

Et tu, Wikipedia?

My god, why does every damn piece of text suddenly need to be summarized by AI? It's completely insane to me. I want to read articles, not their summaries in 3 bullet points. I want to read books, not cliff notes, I want to read what people write to me in their emails instead of AI slop. Not everything needs to be a fucking summary!

It seriously feels like the whole damn world is going crazy, which means it's probably me...

AI threads on lemmy are always such a disappointment.

Its ironic that people put so little thought into understanding this and complain about "ai slop". The slop was in your heads all along.

To think that more accessibility for a project that is all about sharing information with people to whom information is least accessible is a bad thing is just an incredible lack of awareness.

Its literally the opposite of everything people might hate AI for:

• RAG is very good and accurate these days that doesn't invent stuff. Especially for short content like wiki articles. I work with RAG almost every day and never seen it hallucinate with big models.
• it's open and not run a "big scary tech"
• it's free for all and would save millions of editor hours and allow more accuracy and complexity in the articles themselves.

And to top it all you know this is a lost fight even if you're right so instead of contributing to steering this societal ship these people cover their ears and "bla bla bla we don't want it". It's so disappointingly irresponsible.

If people use AI to summarize passages of written words to be simpler for those with poor reading skills to be able to more easily comprehend the words, then how are those readers going to improve their poor reading skills?

Dumbing things down with AI isn't going to make people smarter I bet. This seems like accelerating into Idiocracy

Is the point of Wikipedia to provide everyone with information, or to allow editors to spew jargon into opaque articles that are only accessible to experts?

I think it's the former. There are very few topics that can't be explained simply, if the author is willing to consider their audience. Best of all, absolutely nothing is lost when an expert reads a well written article.

Relax, this is not the doom and gloom some of y'all think this is and that is pretty telling.

If you can't make people smarter, make text dumber.

Which Dijkstra quote?

Many people who are in a position to write opaque jargon lack the perspective that would be required to explain it to a person who isn't already very well-versed. Math articles are often like that, which doesn't surprise me. I've had a few math professors who appeared completely unable to understand how to explain the subject to anyone who wasn't already good at it. I had to drop their classes and try my luck with others.

I feel like a few of them are in this thread!

How dare you bring nuance, experience and moderation into the conversation.

Seriously, though, I am a firm believer that no tech is inherently bad, though the people who wield it might well be. It's rare to see a good, responsible use of LLMs but I think this is one of them.

Et tu, Wikipedia?

My god, why does every damn piece of text suddenly need to be summarized by AI? It's completely insane to me. I want to read articles, not their summaries in 3 bullet points. I want to read books, not cliff notes, I want to read what people write to me in their emails instead of AI slop. Not everything needs to be a fucking summary!

It seriously feels like the whole damn world is going crazy, which means it's probably me...

Paraphrasing, but: "testing can only show presence of bugs, not their absence"

Trolling aside, yeah, being able to explain a concept in everyday terms takes careful thought and discipline. I'm consistently impressed by the people who write Simple articles on Wikipedia. I wish there were more of those articles.

Giving people incorrect information is not an accessibility feature

I don't think the idea itself is awful, but everyone is so fed up with AI bullshit that any attempt to integrate even an iota of it will be received very poorly, so I'm not sure it's worth it.

TIL: Wikipedia uses complex language.

It might just be me, but I find articles written on Wikipedia much more easier to read than shit sometimes people write or speak to me. Sometimes it is incomprehensible garbage, or without much sense.

You've clearly never tried to use Wikipedia to help with your math homework

Then skip the AI summary.