17 ms·

AI tidies up Wikipedia's references and boosts reliability

156 points by clockworksoul 3y ago

orsenthil 3y ago
Is there a link to this SIDE project?
- mistrial9 3y ago
  Code availability The code to reproduce our experiments is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/side https://github.com/facebookresearch/side under MIT License and Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8252866 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8252866
  - rsingel 3y ago
    Somewhat ironically your link to Zenodo is malformed and goes to a non existent page. The correct URL is https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8252866 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8252866
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      thank you! also ironically, together we fixed it -- no AI
mistrial9 3y ago
this publicity does not include the MWF internal efforts for the last six+ years? only a META-owned research project?
- daniel-cussen 3y ago
  [dead]
pastage 3y ago
SIDE looks impressive I wonder how it works and finds these resources. I think the evaluation is flawed these subjective numbers would mean nothing if I did the survey. Looking at some Wikipedia pages in the SIDE demo (linked in comments here), it is clear that they in some cases fail to identify what claims are made in the article, and that the subjective choice of references are too binary. I double check references on wikipedia in subjects where I have basic understanding, it is usually easy to find better references but it takes so much time. So very impressive.
iamflimflam1 3y ago
Urman points out that the Wikipedia users who tested the SIDE system were twice as likely to prefer neither of the references as they were to prefer the AI-suggested ones. “This would mean that in these cases, they would still go and search for the relevant citation online,” she says. This seems like an optimistic interpretation.
Aurornis 3y ago
When Sci-Hub made a lot of papers available to the public, I started clicking through to more references on Wikipedia. My goal was to learn more and go deeper on subjects, but I was stunned by how often the linked citation didn't support the claim in the Wikipedia article. There were many times where the linked citation said the opposite of the Wikipedia article. My theory was that overly competitive Wikipedia authors were skimming PubMed abstracts and assuming the paper would support their assertion. Ironically, some of the statements with 5 or more citations were the most incorrect. Trying to correct these articles is some times like going to war with editors who refuse to admit they were wrong.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  Not only do some papers not support the claim at all (I found this to often be the case when I used to read the news regularly), but there is often a critical detail left out of the abstract that is key to how the study should be interpreted. The vast majority of people citing papers, by my measure, are relying solely on the abstract even when the entire paper is available for free. This is often the case outside of Wikipedia as well. Truthfully, I'm a layman because I don't have an advanced degree that suggests I'm qualified to interpret papers, but things are bad enough IMO that part of me wishes people would stop trying to communicate science to the public until this broken system heals at least somewhat. On a related note, it doesn't help that folks like Andrew Huberman are normalizing this idea that one or two studies are good enough to form conclusions about how average people can "optimize" (micromanage) their lives in ways that are clinically relevant. This isn't to take away from the good that Huberman does, but I think it send a the wrong message to people who don't actually have any experience reading papers. One thing that might help is forbidding abstracts and conclusion sections in papers published in journals, which might cut down on some of the misunderstandings and make it harder to pass off a paper as support for a claim. > Trying to correct these articles is some times like going to war with editors who refuse to admit they were wrong. There is virtually no point in trying to fix Wikipedia pages until Wikipedia fixes themselves. They have an extremely hard job, but their prolific editors are too bully-like and contradict themselves all the time.
  - 3y ago
brotchie 3y ago
I feel like this right here is what the singularity actually feels like. With minimal effort, humans hookup AI to do some job, and things "just get better" rather than entropy taking its natural course and many things (without maintenance) trending towards "worse". Once you have a bunch of this human / super-human level doing mundane things on wikipedia, they're now there in perpetuity, constantly improving. I suspect this is what's going to start to happen across the economy: all of a sudden, the sidewalks seem cleaner, and trains run on time more often, traffic seems less congested, and latency in your favorite software product starts going down (with AI being turned loose on that legacy's software's code base that it gradually refactoring and optimizing in the background). Effectively, what typically is happening due to entropy (decay, latency, quality, dirtiness) will start to move in the opposite direction due to automation and background AI. This reversal of perceived entropy will start gradual, and then accelerate, and then on a day-to-day basis many things you touch in your daily life will be improving and then... singularity.
- nemo 3y ago
  Some things might get micro-optimized by AI in ways that benefit people in general, but a lot will be micro-optimized to extract more profit out of customers at their expense and to replace or coerce workers in various ways. People will wield AI the way people wield every technology. Some techno-optimists thought that TV, personal computers, the internet and other technologies would bring some bright enlightened future, pretty sure AI optimists will see the same results as the others.
  - adventured 3y ago
    > Some techno-optimists thought that TV, personal computers, the internet and other technologies would bring some bright enlightened future They were right, on a case by case basis. It meant a brighter, more enlightened future for me personally. I was born in nowhere Appalachia with access to nothing. A third tier failed retail store was exciting to have access to; a McDonalds was exciting to have access to. The Web appeared like god damn magic cast down from the heavens circa 1994-1995. I had almost zero interest in computers growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s. I immediately understood what could be done with the Internet: I didn't need to ask permission, I could just immediately start creating anything I was capable of building on this new canvas; no licensing, no heavy government restrictions, no enormous bureaucratic walls to climb over: dial up and go. Go learn, go create, go chat with people from Australia or France, go meet thousands of people on WebChatBroadCasting or IRC, go become part of the Doom & Quake mod scene and learn how to program/script/design levels/whatever. I think only highly privileged people would fail to grasp how extraordinary it was, they already had access to really nice things.
layer8 3y ago
> A neural network can identify references that are unlikely to support an article’s claims, and scour the web for better sources. That seems like the wrong approach? The claims of an article should be informed by all relevant sources, not the selection of sources be informed by the claims of an article.
- paxys 3y ago
  There is no bit of information on the planet that is corroborated by all relevant sources. There will always be some percentage of people critical of the prevailing theory, and if you want to go for 100% consensus for every article then there would be no Wikipedia.
  - Etherlord87 3y ago
    The OP didn't say a claim can only be made if 100% of sources agree. He said that one should first google a subject, gather information, and aggregate multiple sources into a summary, rather than writing a summary first, and then googling for the sources that support it…
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  xkcd #978 as a Service
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
I’m sure I’m not the only person that read it as AI tiddies, so I’ll take the hit here just to let you know it wasn’t just you.
- ender1235 3y ago
  Was looking for you lol.
  - punkspider 3y ago
    Same here. I was afraid that maybe nobody said anything and I'd have to be the one to say it first.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      What country are you from? I would consider "tiddies" to be a somewhat strange misspelling of "titties". Compare https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/titty_bar https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/titty_bar .
      - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
        It’s internet slang. Looks like the earliest urban dictionary entry is 2012. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tiddy https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tiddy
      - fsckboy 3y ago
        just for the record, nitty gritty has become niddy griddy
wolverine876 3y ago
Perhaps someone who has read the paper itself can address this question: If input a claim that is unsupported, and you search for support, isn't that a fundamental error? That is, is the software assuming the claim is accurate?
- skybrian 3y ago
  It seems like it would be the same search if you were looking for evidence that it’s false, and you wouldn’t find anything if it’s unsupported?
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Maybe you would find contrary evidence?
- yosito 3y ago
  Absolutely! It seems like searching for evidence to fit a conclusion, rather than the scientific approach of trying to disprove a hypothesis.
dougmwne 3y ago
Isn’t this kind of like saying “Adding a blur filter makes people look younger.”
an_aparallel 3y ago
What i dont understand is how we cant just feed papers into some sort of text > logical fallacy analysis which checks for the known fallacies, checks argument logic, checks sources (scores based on study size, and other requirements which qualify good studies) and just stops things right in their tracks before being added the "corpus" of knowledge..?? I'm just talking out of my ass here - im sure politics and other human factors stop something so seemingly simple from being implemented.... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340531396_Automated_Discovery_of_Logical_Fallacies_in_Legal_Argumentation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340531396_Automated...
- dorpstein 3y ago
  [dead]
lgats 3y ago
When SIDE’s results were shown to a group of Wikipedia users, 21% preferred the citations found by the AI, 10% preferred the existing citations and 39% did not have a preference. and 30% didn't respond?
- ozyschmozy 3y ago
  I was wondering about that too. Later there is "[...] Wikipedia users who tested the SIDE system were twice as likely to prefer neither of the references as they were to prefer the AI-suggested ones". Not clear if this is the same as "did not have a preference". And if it's not, now we've got 110%
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
weffosneffo878 3y ago
[dead]
RecycledEle 3y ago
AI is the replacement for low-effort work. What annoys me is that all the managers who were accruing technical debt were right. AI will clean it up for them, decades later.

156 points by clockworksoul 3y ago

orsenthil 3y ago

Is there a link to this SIDE project?

mistrial9 3y ago
Code availability The code to reproduce our experiments is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/side https://github.com/facebookresearch/side under MIT License and Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8252866 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8252866
- rsingel 3y ago
  Somewhat ironically your link to Zenodo is malformed and goes to a non existent page. The correct URL is https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8252866 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8252866
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    thank you! also ironically, together we fixed it -- no AI

mistrial9 3y ago

this publicity does not include the MWF internal efforts for the last six+ years? only a META-owned research project?

daniel-cussen 3y ago
[dead]

pastage 3y ago

SIDE looks impressive I wonder how it works and finds these resources. I think the evaluation is flawed these subjective numbers would mean nothing if I did the survey. Looking at some Wikipedia pages in the SIDE demo (linked in comments here), it is clear that they in some cases fail to identify what claims are made in the article, and that the subjective choice of references are too binary. I double check references on wikipedia in subjects where I have basic understanding, it is usually easy to find better references but it takes so much time. So very impressive.

iamflimflam1 3y ago

Urman points out that the Wikipedia users who tested the SIDE system were twice as likely to prefer neither of the references as they were to prefer the AI-suggested ones. “This would mean that in these cases, they would still go and search for the relevant citation online,” she says. This seems like an optimistic interpretation.

Aurornis 3y ago

When Sci-Hub made a lot of papers available to the public, I started clicking through to more references on Wikipedia. My goal was to learn more and go deeper on subjects, but I was stunned by how often the linked citation didn't support the claim in the Wikipedia article. There were many times where the linked citation said the opposite of the Wikipedia article. My theory was that overly competitive Wikipedia authors were skimming PubMed abstracts and assuming the paper would support their assertion. Ironically, some of the statements with 5 or more citations were the most incorrect. Trying to correct these articles is some times like going to war with editors who refuse to admit they were wrong.

ravenstine 3y ago
Not only do some papers not support the claim at all (I found this to often be the case when I used to read the news regularly), but there is often a critical detail left out of the abstract that is key to how the study should be interpreted. The vast majority of people citing papers, by my measure, are relying solely on the abstract even when the entire paper is available for free. This is often the case outside of Wikipedia as well. Truthfully, I'm a layman because I don't have an advanced degree that suggests I'm qualified to interpret papers, but things are bad enough IMO that part of me wishes people would stop trying to communicate science to the public until this broken system heals at least somewhat. On a related note, it doesn't help that folks like Andrew Huberman are normalizing this idea that one or two studies are good enough to form conclusions about how average people can "optimize" (micromanage) their lives in ways that are clinically relevant. This isn't to take away from the good that Huberman does, but I think it send a the wrong message to people who don't actually have any experience reading papers. One thing that might help is forbidding abstracts and conclusion sections in papers published in journals, which might cut down on some of the misunderstandings and make it harder to pass off a paper as support for a claim. > Trying to correct these articles is some times like going to war with editors who refuse to admit they were wrong. There is virtually no point in trying to fix Wikipedia pages until Wikipedia fixes themselves. They have an extremely hard job, but their prolific editors are too bully-like and contradict themselves all the time.
- 3y ago

brotchie 3y ago

I feel like this right here is what the singularity actually feels like. With minimal effort, humans hookup AI to do some job, and things "just get better" rather than entropy taking its natural course and many things (without maintenance) trending towards "worse". Once you have a bunch of this human / super-human level doing mundane things on wikipedia, they're now there in perpetuity, constantly improving. I suspect this is what's going to start to happen across the economy: all of a sudden, the sidewalks seem cleaner, and trains run on time more often, traffic seems less congested, and latency in your favorite software product starts going down (with AI being turned loose on that legacy's software's code base that it gradually refactoring and optimizing in the background). Effectively, what typically is happening due to entropy (decay, latency, quality, dirtiness) will start to move in the opposite direction due to automation and background AI. This reversal of perceived entropy will start gradual, and then accelerate, and then on a day-to-day basis many things you touch in your daily life will be improving and then... singularity.

nemo 3y ago
Some things might get micro-optimized by AI in ways that benefit people in general, but a lot will be micro-optimized to extract more profit out of customers at their expense and to replace or coerce workers in various ways. People will wield AI the way people wield every technology. Some techno-optimists thought that TV, personal computers, the internet and other technologies would bring some bright enlightened future, pretty sure AI optimists will see the same results as the others.
- adventured 3y ago
  > Some techno-optimists thought that TV, personal computers, the internet and other technologies would bring some bright enlightened future They were right, on a case by case basis. It meant a brighter, more enlightened future for me personally. I was born in nowhere Appalachia with access to nothing. A third tier failed retail store was exciting to have access to; a McDonalds was exciting to have access to. The Web appeared like god damn magic cast down from the heavens circa 1994-1995. I had almost zero interest in computers growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s. I immediately understood what could be done with the Internet: I didn't need to ask permission, I could just immediately start creating anything I was capable of building on this new canvas; no licensing, no heavy government restrictions, no enormous bureaucratic walls to climb over: dial up and go. Go learn, go create, go chat with people from Australia or France, go meet thousands of people on WebChatBroadCasting or IRC, go become part of the Doom & Quake mod scene and learn how to program/script/design levels/whatever. I think only highly privileged people would fail to grasp how extraordinary it was, they already had access to really nice things.

layer8 3y ago

> A neural network can identify references that are unlikely to support an article’s claims, and scour the web for better sources. That seems like the wrong approach? The claims of an article should be informed by all relevant sources, not the selection of sources be informed by the claims of an article.

paxys 3y ago
There is no bit of information on the planet that is corroborated by all relevant sources. There will always be some percentage of people critical of the prevailing theory, and if you want to go for 100% consensus for every article then there would be no Wikipedia.
- Etherlord87 3y ago
  The OP didn't say a claim can only be made if 100% of sources agree. He said that one should first google a subject, gather information, and aggregate multiple sources into a summary, rather than writing a summary first, and then googling for the sources that support it…
mcpackieh 3y ago
xkcd #978 as a Service

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago

I’m sure I’m not the only person that read it as AI tiddies, so I’ll take the hit here just to let you know it wasn’t just you.

ender1235 3y ago
Was looking for you lol.
- punkspider 3y ago
  Same here. I was afraid that maybe nobody said anything and I'd have to be the one to say it first.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    What country are you from? I would consider "tiddies" to be a somewhat strange misspelling of "titties". Compare https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/titty_bar https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/titty_bar .
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      It’s internet slang. Looks like the earliest urban dictionary entry is 2012. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tiddy https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tiddy
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      just for the record, nitty gritty has become niddy griddy

wolverine876 3y ago

Perhaps someone who has read the paper itself can address this question: If input a claim that is unsupported, and you search for support, isn't that a fundamental error? That is, is the software assuming the claim is accurate?

skybrian 3y ago
It seems like it would be the same search if you were looking for evidence that it’s false, and you wouldn’t find anything if it’s unsupported?
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Maybe you would find contrary evidence?
yosito 3y ago
Absolutely! It seems like searching for evidence to fit a conclusion, rather than the scientific approach of trying to disprove a hypothesis.

dougmwne 3y ago

Isn’t this kind of like saying “Adding a blur filter makes people look younger.”

an_aparallel 3y ago

What i dont understand is how we cant just feed papers into some sort of text > logical fallacy analysis which checks for the known fallacies, checks argument logic, checks sources (scores based on study size, and other requirements which qualify good studies) and just stops things right in their tracks before being added the "corpus" of knowledge..?? I'm just talking out of my ass here - im sure politics and other human factors stop something so seemingly simple from being implemented.... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340531396_Automated_Discovery_of_Logical_Fallacies_in_Legal_Argumentation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340531396_Automated...

dorpstein 3y ago
[dead]

lgats 3y ago

When SIDE’s results were shown to a group of Wikipedia users, 21% preferred the citations found by the AI, 10% preferred the existing citations and 39% did not have a preference. and 30% didn't respond?

ozyschmozy 3y ago
I was wondering about that too. Later there is "[...] Wikipedia users who tested the SIDE system were twice as likely to prefer neither of the references as they were to prefer the AI-suggested ones". Not clear if this is the same as "did not have a preference". And if it's not, now we've got 110%

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

weffosneffo878 3y ago

[dead]

RecycledEle 3y ago

AI is the replacement for low-effort work. What annoys me is that all the managers who were accruing technical debt were right. AI will clean it up for them, decades later.