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Meta is building an AI to fact-check Wikipedia
- maplekyss 4y agomore censorship, thanks Facebook!
- outside1234 4y agoMaybe they could start with their posts?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tomohawk 4y agoNot scary at all that the company that censored news articles at the behest of the FBI in order to swing an election is going to do even more "fact checking".
- gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
- ohiovr 4y agoAI is going to doom human culture if you let it.
- edgyquant 4y agoYep just like the written word
- ohiovr 4y agoWritten by who?
- didericis 4y agoNo, it’s quite different. It’s taking subtle human judgement out of decision making. Some systems don’t need subtle social decision making. Using AI for those systems is great. But a lot do. And in those that do, if you’re not careful and automate too much, errors compound. Quickly. AI recommendation engines have already ripped society apart and increased division, because the subtle bridge building that human curation enables is removed. Hospital systems have been being increasingly systematized and are becoming increasingly hellish and expensive. They’re a non AI example of the same phenomenon. The risks are in trying to systematizes things with a social aspect. I love automation and think we should strive to free up as much time for exploration, creativity, and human connection as we can. But AI is just plain bad at understanding us, and always will be, in my view. It will always be a mimic. It simply cannot do the subtle social things humans do because it does not have the motivations that enable that subtle behavior.
- greendude29 4y agoThere has to a term that refers to comments like the above - simple one liners that at first might seem true; they appeal to a basal irrational nature within us that has an impulsive reaction, as if a pointed jab. But the more you think about them, the less sense it makes. The comment above is nonsense; dangerous at worst, idiotic at best. There's no comparison between AI and writing.
- mistermann 4y agoIncorrect intuitive beliefs that appear to the holder as knowledge? The problem is so common, I really think there should be a term.
- mistermann 4y agoI predict humans will doom themselves first.
- ohiovr 4y agoActually the image of the beast is removed a long time from now. Not seen it yet and not sure I will live to see it but it isn't hard to see what it would be.
- mistermann 4y agoImage of the beast?
- IIAOPSW 4y agoBut AI culture is going to be a cool replacement.
- kmeisthax 4y agoI am highly skeptical that this would work. Seems more like ML boosterism than a reasonable way to verify Wikipedia.
- edgyquant 4y agoMight spark an arms race that results in something useful though
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoHopefully more "useful" than Politifact.
- npmaile 4y agoThis certainly won't be used for political purposes
- jjcon 4y agoFor how political Wikipedia already is maybe this can only help?
- goldenchrome 4y agoBoth forces are pushing in the same woke direction so I doubt it very much.
- iso1631 4y agoWhat do you mean by woke?
- antifa 4y agoHe's trying to make "not being racist" sound like a bad thing while derailing the discussion.
- goldenchrome 4y agoPeople who are woke often think that they are good, and therefore their feelings and opinions are objectively correct. It follows that anyone who disagrees is wrong, and therefore bad. It’s a dangerous ideology because it discounts the fact that we all have a capacity for good and evil. No one is good all the time, and certainly no one is good without intense introspection. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- galangalalgol 4y agoLooking for accurate historical or political information from any single source is going to lead to inaccuracies. Every single one has an interest in promoting a certain view of both historic and current events. Usually math or science facts are wrong on Wikipedia simply due to human error. Unless they somehow have bearing on a historic or current event that is contentious. In that case you are back to being unable trust any single source without corroboration wikipedia or otherwise.
- aero-glide2 4y agoWhen you are an undergrad, Wikipedia is magic. When pursuing a PhD you realise how much of wiki is not completely accurate.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoWiki articles ≠ sources
- oarabbus_ 4y agoBut wiki article citations == sources.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoThat's exactly what I was getting at!
- IIAOPSW 4y agowiki articles !=== sources
- netr0ute 4y agoAlternatively, it's shocking how little information is actually on the Wiki, even though it's easily available from common university classes.
- Eliezer 4y agoNot credible from the BlenderBot company.
- ipsum2 4y agoHave you tried out the demo linked? https://verifier.sideeditor.com/ https://verifier.sideeditor.com/ https://github.com/facebookresearch/side https://github.com/facebookresearch/side
- joshstrange 4y agoI'm not religious anymore but this feel applicable: > Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. - Matthew 7:5 (Sorry, I grew up on KJV, it what I remember and what sounds right in my head)
- justahuman74 4y agoSomehow I don't imagine AIs knowing fact from data?
- mccorrinall 4y agoUsually the truth is somewhere on the web, just not necessarily on the wikipedia article.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoWhat more is a fact than data everyone agrees with the veracity of? What more is reality than shared consensus?
- ohiovr 4y agoFact is pain and toil which AI will never understand. It can never understand what it means to be a people hunted down and exterminated. It means pain and toil.
- MrTrvp 4y agoCan it measure the space in intent between 2 extreme articles? Perhaps multiple? and average out the data in it? Something like a disparity rate
- bhaney 4y agoAnd then what is it going to do once it "grades" the information pulled from sources? Edit the article? I don't expect it to be accurate enough to avoid getting quickly banned or auto-reverted. Raise some issue for volunteers to manually review? Probably not accurate or important enough to be a priority given the likely volume. Honestly a good portion of the sources I check out in a wikipedia article just 404 or have become paywalled, and that would be pretty trivial for a bot to detect, so there's obviously not a huge desire to have bots checking sources in the first place.
- langsoul-com 4y agoBut who trains and fact checks the AI? Hasn't Metas AI got a lot of FB stuff incorrectly flagged?
- oarabbus_ 4y agoFrom the article and the cited Meta blog post, the AI is trained on millions of wiki citations. As for what it's attempting to do: >Automated tools can help identify gibberish or statements that lack citations, but helping human editors determine whether a source actually backs up a claim is a much more complex task — one that requires an AI system’s depth of understanding and analysis. >we’ve developed the first model capable of automatically scanning hundreds of thousands of citations at once to check whether they truly support the corresponding claims.
- UberFly 4y agoObviously they'll get another AI to train the first one. AIs all the way down!
- superjan 4y agoI suppose it helps that truth is self-consistent? You could write articles explaining a flat earth model but that would introduce many ad-hoc arguments that violate other observations and confirmed physics phenomena.
- riddleronroof 4y agoDoes FB contribute to Wikipedia’s funding? Can they fact check the current news? Color me skeptical.
- oarabbus_ 4y agoMany of the comments in this thread seem to not have anything to do with the content of the article, or the researchers' blog post cited within the article. There also seem to be some mistaken assumptions about the purpose of this AI. Here is what the model is actually (attempting) to do: >It calls attention to questionable citations, allowing human editors to evaluate the cases most likely to be flawed without having to sift through thousands of properly cited statements. If a citation seems irrelevant, our model will suggest a more applicable source, even pointing to the specific passage that supports the claim. Eventually, our goal is to build a platform to help Wikipedia editors systematically spot citation issues and quickly fix the citation or correct the content of the corresponding article at scale.
- tmaly 4y agoIf the citations are to really old out of print books, how can it tell what is true and what is not?
- charcircuit 4y agoThey admit in the research paper that the AI is only for references to web pages for articles written in English. You can't use it to verify citations to books. Edit: To clarify it could replace a citation to a book with a web page assuming that information exists on the internet.
- tux3 4y agoPlugging it into your local libgen/scihub equivalent is left as an exercise to the reader Nothing that can't be done in principle, just hard/tedious engineering
- oarabbus_ 4y agoThe article states the training set included 134 million only webpage/URL citations. Since it is open-source, I'd imagine some researchers with computer vision expertise and skilled with document/text digitization could greatly enhance this AI by digitizing these old books and including them in the training.
- laserbeam 4y agoMost of my life I have been told: "do not rely on Wikipedia, it is inaccurate". And I get it, it's true if you're going through academia... But. Compare to the rest of the internet. Compare to every single propaganda website. Text on Wikipedia has one of the highest chances of being true by default. If a random website contradicts Wikipedia one shouldn't trust that website. I'm sick of people comparing Wikipedia to peer reviewed journals... When instead people get their knowledge from tabloids, random newspapers, individuals getting mad in youtube videos, and websites like Facebook. If Facebook claims to know more about the world than Wikipedia, it should factcheck itself.
- epgui 4y agoAnyone who says you shouldn't rely on wikipedia because it's inaccurate is confused about what wikipedia is, and what encyclopedias are supposed to be used for. The lesson teachers should have been teaching was that you shouldn't cite the thing in a scholarly work as if it was a primary (or even secondary) source. Just like you shouldn't cite the Encyclopedia Britannica, or any other encyclopedia, in a paper.
- somenameforme 4y agoYou seem to be falsely equating the Wiki model, with the Encyclopedia model. Encyclopedias could be, and regularly were, referenced as factual and primary sources. The reason is that encyclopedias in the past were predominately written by subject matter experts. As an example writers for Britannica included no less than Milton Friedman, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and even Leon Trotsky to go in a different direction. [1] Wikipedia, by contrast, is written by whoever can engage in the Wiki-world equivalent of getting the most likes. And its writers are whoever wins what is effectively a glorified Reddit-like upvote system. Ostensibly this is balanced against the fact that editors cannot themselves work as primary sources on Wikipedia: Einstein himself would not be allowed to write about physics on Wikipedia, but this also means Joe Editor also can't write as a primary source. Instead everything is exclusively sourced from other sites. The problem is that this is where bias comes into play. If Joe Editor wants to publish that 2+2=5 in the mathematics section and he can find an article on The Verge claiming so, then he can do so. If somebody wants to correct him, and he doesn't want to change, then edit wars begin. And in these cases, the truth itself is secondary to more normal aspects of social media. This is where Wikipedia fails. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica#Contributors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica#C...
- thebeastie 4y agoFacebook Truth Machine. Sounds dangerous tbh
- oarabbus_ 4y agoThat indeed sounds dangerous, but this article is about an open-sourced AI research project, which I'm not sure qualifies as that.
- thebeastie 4y agoIf they have a machine which is good at identifying suspicious information, on a huge scale, they may also be able to control which information is suspicious, to a limited extent. It could easily be part of an effective apparatus of repression.
- oarabbus_ 4y agoThere's nothing in the article about a machine which identifies suspicious information, or information control, or an apparatus of repression. Perhaps you're referring to some other thread? There is however, an open-source AI, and a github link to it. If you're familiar with Python you can literally read the code yourself and look for anything nefarious.
- enviclash 4y agoWhose are the valid sources? Is this about technicalities of citation validity or more about "truth" setting?
- peter_d_sherman 4y agoWho guards the guardians? Who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Which authoritative AI determines the authoritativeness of the other AI's? ? Or, perhaps phrased in "American Dad" terms... "Who's manning the Internet?" <g> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes
- peter_d_sherman 4y agoAlso... who downvotes the downvoters? <g> (And, related questions, like "Who trolls the trolls?", "Who thought polices the thought police?", "Who propagandizes the propagandists?", "Who spams the spammers?", etc., etc.! <g>)
- cletus 4y agoI can't help but think of The Onion's take on Wikipedia [1]. It's more accurate to say that this AI is fact-checking citations. There are lots of ways you can skew or fabircate information on Wikipedia. One well known way is to create some source for a claim and then cite it on Wikipedia. What will an AI do in this case? 3-4 years ago I stood in Menlo Park when Mark Zuckerberg got up and announced in response to the misinformation issues of the 2016 election that an effort would be made to fact check articles. My immediate thought, which hasn't changed, is "that's never going to work". You will always find edge cases where reasonable people would disagree but that's not even the big problem. The big problem is that there are lots of people who aren't the slightest bit interested in the "truth". I've heard it say that whatever ridiculous claim you want to fabricate, you can find 30% of Americans who will believe it. As soon as you start trying to label content as truthful or not, you won't change the minds of most people. For many you will be contradicting their world view and you'll simply be dismissed as "biases" or "fake news". I honestly don't know what the solution to this is. I do think sharing links on Facebook itself was probably a mistake for many reasons. So this effort to fact check citations just seems more of the same doomed policy. Disclaimer: Ex-Facebooker. [1]: https://www.theonion.com/wikipedia-celebrates-750-years-of-american-independence-1819568571 https://www.theonion.com/wikipedia-celebrates-750-years-of-a...
- ohiovr 4y agoThe solution comes from Sir Francis Bacon who said: “Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
- ohiovr 4y agoFortunately I got a 2 year old clone of wiki on a zim file. 2.6 GB isn't all that much and it has pictures. I don't think I will trust wiki ever again if they do this. It is already like an encylopedia made in bar bathroom graphiti. Now they want to turn it into 4chan.
- kradeelav 4y agoHonestly, 4chan would be a vast improvement over the sound of this. At least it's funny occasionally.
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- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CapricornNoble 4y ago>>>It is already like an encylopedia made in bar bathroom graphiti. Now they want to turn it into 4chan. Are you familiar with Encyclopedia Dramatica? It's basically Wiki for Internet Culture, if all of Wiki's editors where autistic drama merchants from 4chan. It's glorious: https://encyclopediadramatica.online/Category:Weeaboos https://encyclopediadramatica.online/Category:Weeaboos
- ohiovr 4y agothat brings back memories. Ever peruse urban dictionary?
- CapricornNoble 4y agoAn invaluable tool for Internet culture! I loved comparing the different definitions for explicit or semi-explicit terms like "thot", "coal burner", etc.. That site was immortalized by Cracked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgQMTLKmwrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgQMTLKmwrA "That's a blumpkin yo."
- peter_d_sherman 4y agoNever believe anything you read on the Internet... ...including this comment! <g>
- lostmsu 4y agoI wonder if this famous quote by Lenin is in the dataset: "The humanity's biggest problem with quotes you find on the Internet is that people tend to immediately believe in their authenticity."
- addicted 4y agoThis is clearly gonna be a failure as far as truth is concerned. What Meta is gonna try here is to use AI to overwhelm reality based on Human Resources to meet whatever Mr Zuck believes reality is. IOW they’re gonna DDOS Wikipedia to show Mark’s reality. Anyone who thinks that’s not gonna happen (whether it happens intentionally or not) is just fooling themselves.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sweezyjeezy 4y agoFor now as far as I know, bots are not allowed to make edits to Wikipedia. This could only ever be used to make suggestions to a human editor. If Mark wanted to make targeted changes to Wikipedia, there would be easier ways to do it than this.
- Kim_Bruning 4y agoBots are allowed to make edits, if carefully monitored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_policy For edits that require judgement, a common mode is to use semi-automated tools where there is still a Human-In-The-Loop. (edit) And if you look at their demo, the latter is exactly how it works. https://verifier.sideeditor.com/ https://verifier.sideeditor.com/ . With a human in the loop like this, this could be a powerful tool.
- aaron695 4y ago
- tiarafawn 4y agoThe original blog post would be a better link to post here rather than the article: https://tech.fb.com/artificial-intelligence/2022/07/how-ai-could-help-make-wikipedia-entries-more-accurate/ https://tech.fb.com/artificial-intelligence/2022/07/how-ai-c... Reading through it, I strongly disagree with FB's example for "Better citations in action". I don't see an improvement in the wording and IMO they would be making it worse by switching from an official first party source to a third party one. While their tool might be useful to find semantic (mis)matches, a much more important part of verifying citations is to verify that the source has any business to make claims about the matter in the first place. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ QUOTE Better citations in action Usually, to develop models like this, the input might be just a sentence or two. We trained our models with complicated statements from Wikipedia, accompanied by full websites that may or may not support the claims. As a result, our models have achieved a leap in performance in terms of detecting the accuracy of citations. For example, our system found a better source for a citation in the Wikipedia article “2017 in Classical Music.” The claim reads: “The Los Angeles Philharmonic announces the appointment of Simon Woods as its next president and chief executive officer, effective 22 January 2018.” The current Wikipedia footnote for this statement links to a press release from the Dallas Symphony Association announcing the appointment of its new president and CEO, also effective January 22, 2018. Despite their similarities, our evidence-ranking model deduced that the press release was not relevant to the claim. Our AI indices suggested another possible source, a blog post on the website Violinist.com, which notes, “On Thursday Los Angeles Philharmonic announced the appointment of Simon Woods as its new Chief Executive Director, effective Jan. 22, 2018.” The evidence-ranking model then correctly concluded that this was more relevant than Wikipedia’s existing citation for the claim. /QUOTE
- charcircuit 4y ago>I strongly disagree with FB's example for "Better citations in action". I think you misread something. The article that was originally cited is not relevant. It was about someone else becoming CEO for a different organization.
- tiarafawn 4y ago
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoMore in their line to build a fact-checker on the sort of Metaverse nonsense Zuck seems to be heavily invested in. The only reason for doing something like this is to ultimately subvert the Wikimedia editors, setting up Factbook/Meta as the sole arbiter of what's correct and true on Wikipedia.
- classified 4y agoIt does look like Zuck’s next attempt at usurping the role of Arbiter of Truth. Seems to be one of his obsessions.
- antifa 4y agoFinally he'll be able to erase from the internet that some of the earliest versions of facebook were about perving on his classmates. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheSocialNetwork https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheSocialNetwork
- blooalien 4y agoOne the one hand, good on them for tryin' to do somethin' properly innovative with "AI", but on the other hand, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH! Meta "fact-checking"? Hahahahahah!
- giomasce 4y agoAfter all, Meta is expert about building websites with high quality content, devoid of any shade of fabricated stuff.
- egberts1 4y agoThis is the science of citiogenisis. Fact-check is already a sullied overloaded term. It would be better replaced and served by something like “citation-check”. There are a panoply of cited sources (“facts”) that needs to be properly vetted (“aligned”) to contribute toward its premise (“fact”). This is why Wikipedia can often lay claim to being more scientific (through sheer column of citations containing of “facts”) assembled by its editors (citation scientists). This is also why many educators teach their students not to cite “Wikipedia” which is (a poor attempt?) to indoctrinate the students into learning how to root out the misleading source (often mistaken as “fact”.) Mmmm, but it’s SCIENCE! Doesn’t necessarily means it’s a fact. Meta (“Facebook”) would be venturesome to claim the science of citiogenesis as there are money, prestige, and power to be gained through shaping “science” of these citations. That is, by using artificial intelligence (AI). Arguably, today’s Fact-checkers would try to use a science process that rarely achieves its “factual” (but really called a premise) claim … in a clean and unarbitrary manner while free of bias: always with unnecessary fillers with a goal to sway the readers with cemented anchors to keep it away from their basic but unwanted “fact”. We call those “fact-checkers” an opinionated citation checkers; they save the readers from doing the work by its artificial power of singular analysis through the curation of its premise (“fact”). Fact-checkers are basically wannabe- citiogenesis scientists that are just merely interpreting their point of views. And readers (students) who failed their educators’ lesson would claim it as “fact”. AI may or may not help and into both directions toward and away from their desired premise. How many different algorithms would be used to dislodge this badly-abused citing of these singular analysis efforts by seemingly “fact-checkers”? Who would be in control of this Machine Learning of AI? Meta (Facebook)! Who oversees these AI algorithms? Meta! And who would be the one that watches the watchers? Meta? And will today’s educators teach these future generation of discerning readers on the much needed distinguishing between citation checkersd vs. today’s “fact-checkers”? (*cricket*)
- black_13 4y ago[dead]
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- yrgulation 4y agoLook i understand that ai as a tech will evolve and become better, but right now when i hear something switches to ai i immediately assume low quality and bugs. Brace for false positives and an overall average experience.
- aaaddaaaaa1112 4y ago