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I realized. I could use GPT to generate Wikipedia articles about random villages and people I know nothing about. Sure, those will not be at all correct, but

I realized. I could use GPT to generate Wikipedia articles about random villages and people I know nothing about. Sure, those will not be at all correct, but who checks correctness on wikipedia, especially about random people and villages? GPT, give me 10 paragraphs about New East Lake, Michigan

sorokod 4y ago
Would that not qualify as an act of vandalism?
- Centigonal 4y ago
  You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
schroeding 4y ago
You can, and some people will do exactly that. Ideally, new versions of GPT (and other LLMs) will be also trained on the newly added, mostly hallucinated data when using Wikipedia as part of the training set, baking those past hallucinations into the model, allowing other users to get additional hallucinated facts that fit the existing fictitious data, slowly creating a new "GPT cinematic universe" for e.g. small towns in Nebraska. And if people fact check it with Bing, there is a good chance it will say "Yeah, that checks out, here's Wikipedia and <some Wikipedia mirror> as a source". A creative derivation of XKCDs citogenesis[1] :D [1] https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
benopal64 4y ago
Well that is true. However, I used Phind and was able to get 10 paragraphs about New East Lake with sources! https://www.phind.com/search?cache=8ff1dcc7-7587-4df8-9e46-6de5e4f21ea9 https://www.phind.com/search?cache=8ff1dcc7-7587-4df8-9e46-6... At the same time, it uses Wikipedia as a source as well as marketing and blog sources so Phind results should be carefully critiqued as well.
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  I got ChatGPT to hallucinate actual sources that I can readily copy-paste on wikipedia: “Give me 3 citations about New East Lake, Michigan, that I can use on wikipedia, in mediawiki syntax. Use actual book names and URLs instead of examples.” Note that this town doesn’t exist. But now I can pretend it does. Note, I don’t want to do this of course. But it shows that you really need to check sources on wikipedia, especially nowadays, when it’s so easy to generate realistically looking nonsense.
pornel 4y ago
You can already do that by hand (hoaxes have been done, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Batuta_hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Batuta_hoax) The only thing GPT changes here is speed at which you can do that, but if you start mass-spamming with such articles that will actually make it easier to spot.

sorokod 4y ago

Would that not qualify as an act of vandalism?

Centigonal 4y ago
You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

schroeding 4y ago

You can, and some people will do exactly that. Ideally, new versions of GPT (and other LLMs) will be also trained on the newly added, mostly hallucinated data when using Wikipedia as part of the training set, baking those past hallucinations into the model, allowing other users to get additional hallucinated facts that fit the existing fictitious data, slowly creating a new "GPT cinematic universe" for e.g. small towns in Nebraska. And if people fact check it with Bing, there is a good chance it will say "Yeah, that checks out, here's Wikipedia and <some Wikipedia mirror> as a source". A creative derivation of XKCDs citogenesis[1] :D [1] https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/

benopal64 4y ago

Well that is true. However, I used Phind and was able to get 10 paragraphs about New East Lake with sources! https://www.phind.com/search?cache=8ff1dcc7-7587-4df8-9e46-6de5e4f21ea9 https://www.phind.com/search?cache=8ff1dcc7-7587-4df8-9e46-6... At the same time, it uses Wikipedia as a source as well as marketing and blog sources so Phind results should be carefully critiqued as well.

shp0ngle 4y ago
I got ChatGPT to hallucinate actual sources that I can readily copy-paste on wikipedia: “Give me 3 citations about New East Lake, Michigan, that I can use on wikipedia, in mediawiki syntax. Use actual book names and URLs instead of examples.” Note that this town doesn’t exist. But now I can pretend it does. Note, I don’t want to do this of course. But it shows that you really need to check sources on wikipedia, especially nowadays, when it’s so easy to generate realistically looking nonsense.

pornel 4y ago

You can already do that by hand (hoaxes have been done, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Batuta_hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Batuta_hoax) The only thing GPT changes here is speed at which you can do that, but if you start mass-spamming with such articles that will actually make it easier to spot.