You shouldn’t cite Wikipedia because it is not a source of information, it is a summary of other sources which are referenced.
Right, and if an LLM is citing Wikipedia 47.9% of the time, that means that it’s summarizing Wikipedia’s summary.
You shouldn’t cite Wikipedia for the same reason you shouldn’t cite a library’s book report, you should read and cite the book itself.
Exactly my point.
Throughout most of my years of higher education as well as k-12, I was told that sourcing Wikipedia was forbidden. In fact, many professors/teachers would automatically fail an assignment if they felt you were using wikipedia. The claim was that the information was often inaccurate, or changing too frequently to be reliable. This reasoning, while irritating at times, always made sense to me.
Fast forward to my professional life today. I’ve been told on a number of occasions that I should trust LLMs to give me an accurate answer. I’m told that I will “be left behind” if I don’t use ChatGPT to accomplish things faster. I’m told that my concerns of accuracy and ethics surrounding generative AI is simply “negativity.”
These tools are (abstractly) referencing random users on the internet as well as Wikipedia and treating them both as legitimate sources of information. That seems crazy to me. How can we trust a technology that just references flawed sources from our past? I know there’s ways to improve accuracy with things like RAG, but most people are hitting the LLM directly.
The culture around Generative AI should be scientific and cautious, but instead it feels like a cult with a good marketing team.
Don’t threaten me with a good time!
I spent years trying to convince my friends and family that Elon musk sucks, and then he just went off the deepend. Im glad it’s widely known how much he sucks now, but damn i wish it didnt take so long.
Now if only people knew who Peter Thiel was
Yeah, a lot of people had your perspective about Wikipedia while I was in college, but they are wrong, according to Wikipedia.
From the link:
I personally use ChatGPT like I would Wikipedia. It’s a great introduction to a subject, especially in my line of work, which is software development. I can get summarized information about new languages and frameworks really quickly, and then I can dive into the official documentation when I have a high level understanding of the topic at hand. Unfortunately, most people do not use LLMs this way.