I recently contributed to the LLM “low background steel” problem. I have a blog where I share Wikipedia articles. I wanted to do one on a wiki article for a top

I recently contributed to the LLM “low background steel” problem. I have a blog where I share Wikipedia articles. I wanted to do one on a wiki article for a topic related to AI, but the article I chose was thin on details. So, instead I asked GPT-4 for the info. I edited the output, found scholarly citations for just about every sentence with Google, and then added it to the wiki page. I’m a copywriter (I know, my days are numbered), so I didn’t just plop the generated text in unchanged, but it’s still primarily GPT’s content. I did a nice job, imho, and improved the article greatly. It’s been up for several days now, so I think it has a good chance of staying long term. Still, it’s a funny situation. On the one hand, I did something I’ve done many times before: researched a topic and added to a wiki article. I always feel gratified when I contribute to Wikipedia. I’m adding to the sum of human knowledge in an incredibly direct way. But, the information I added this time will be used to train future LLMs and thus “poison the well” with generated content. The verdict is still out on just how bad generated content will be for training new models. But I definitely feel slightly conflicted about whether I did something that is a net positive or negative.