5 ms·

Right, and where are all those LLMs without the billions upon billions of lines of text written by humans? A not insignificant number coming from Wikipedia? Al

Right, and where are all those LLMs without the billions upon billions of lines of text written by humans? A not insignificant number coming from Wikipedia? Also, LLMs don't produce truth. They don't have a concept of it. Or lies for that matter. If you are using LLMs do study something you know nothing about the information provided by them is as good as useless if you don't verify it with external sources written by a person. Wikipedia isn't perfect, nothing is, but I trust their model a shitload more then an LLM.

mmooss 1y ago
> where are all those LLMs without the billions upon billions of lines of text written by humans? A not insignificant number coming from Wikipedia? Where is Wikipedia without all the learning and information from other sources, many of which it put out of business? > Also, LLMs don't produce truth. They don't have a concept of it. Or lies for that matter. If you are using LLMs do study something you know nothing about the information provided by them is as good as useless if you don't verify it with external sources written by a person. Wikipedia isn't perfect, nothing is, but I trust their model a shitload more then an LLM. Wikipedia produces consensus that correlates with truth to some degree. LLMs produce statistical output, which in a way is a automated consensus of the LLM's input, that also correlates with truth to some degree - and the correlation is hardly zero. I agree that information has no value if you don't know its accuracy; it's always a sticking point for me. IMHO Wikipedia has the same problem: I have no idea how accurate it is without verifying it with an external source (and when I've done that, I've often been disappointed). Has anyone researched the relative accuracy of Wikipedia and LLMs?
- internetter 1y ago
  > Where is Wikipedia without all the learning and information from other sources, many of which it put out of business? Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business? You will frequently see a 5k word article used for a couple of sentences in a Wikipedia page, with the entire Wikipedia page itself being smaller than one paper it cites for one small corner of said page. When I’m researching events, I frequently go to Wikipedia to find sources as search engines have a drastically larger recentism bias. > Has anyone researched the relative accuracy of Wikipedia and LLMs No comparative research on this specific topic has been conducted afaik, and most comparative research is aging (likely, to Wikipedia’s own detriment–general consensus is that Wikipedia’s reliability has increased over time). However at the time of research publication, the consensus seems to be that Wikipedia is generally only slightly less reliable than peers in a given field (ie textbooks or británica), although Wikipedia is often less in depth. The most frequently cited study is a 2005 comparison in Nature which found 4 major errors in both Wikipedia and Británica, and 130 minor errors on Británica whereas 160 on Wikipedia. All studies are documented on Wikipedia itself, see [[Reliability of Wikipedia]]. LLMs… do not have this same reputation.
  - mmooss 1y ago
    > Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business? Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries, websites, etc. For example, I'm sure it impacts McGraw-Hill's AccessScience, which likely you've never heard of. > This is documented on Wikipedia itself Maybe there's a little bias there? Would Wikipedia accept Wikipedia's analysis of its own reliability as a valid source? I've heard that claim, but having no knowledge of the accuracy of any particular article, it's not worth very much to me. > LLMs… do not have this same reputation. They don't with you, but many people obviously use them that way. Also, reputation does not correlate strongly with reality.
    - internetter 1y ago
      > Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries This just seems like healthy competition. I thought we were talking about a situation where Wikipedia’s use of other encyclopedias is an instrument of their demise. > Maybe there's a little bias there Paradoxically, I suspect you’d be pleasantly surprised about how tough this article is on itself. A lot of attention is given to bias in this case. > Would Wikipedia accept Wikipedia's analysis of its own reliability as a valid source? First, it is not Wikipedia’s own analysis. Editors should not present their own conclusions from research, just what each paper says. See [[WP:SYNTH]]. Second, generally Wikipedia discourages anyone citing it as it is not a stable source of information. Much better is to use the sources the article itself conveniently cites inline. As a general policy citing any encyclopedia is discouraged. > having no knowledge of the accuracy of any particular article, it's not worth very much to me. Wikipedia does have internal metrics grading the quality of an article. [[WP:ASSESS]]. In general though, even entirely discounting the Wikipedia component of the británica comparison, based on británicas own failures it seems wise to verify each and every claim in an encyclopedia, which Wikipedia does an excellent job of helping you do. > They don't with you, but many people obviously use them that way. Also, reputation does not correlate strongly with reality OpenAIs own benchmarks show much higher hallucination rates than any study on Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself is quite close to a ban on LLMs for reliability issues. If you ask literally any layman “has ChatGPT ever been wrong for you” they will say yes, either in that moment or after only a little prompting. It is much harder to elicit such a response regarding Wikipedia in my experience https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f3722c1/o3-and-o4-mini-system-card.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f372...
- scuff3d 1y ago
  The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I'm surprised you'd bother trying to make a point there. The difference is humans have a concept of truth, humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) trying to produce something factual. Other humans then come along, with similar intent, and verify it. Studies in the past have shown Wikipedia's accuracy rate is roughly on par with traditional encyclopedias, and more importantly sources are clearly documented. Making validation and further research fairly easy. And if something isn't sourced I know immediately it's more suspect. LLMs have no concept of truth, they have no "intent". They just slap words down based on statistics. It is admittedly very impressive how good they are at doing that, but they don't produce truth in any meaningful way, it more a by product. On top of that all its sources get smashed together, making it much more difficult to verify the validity of any given claim. It's also unpredictable, so the exact same prompt could produce truth one time, and a hallucination another (a situation I have run into when it comes to engineering tasks). And worst of all. Not only will an LLM be wrong, but it will be confidently and persuasively wrong.
  - mmooss 1y ago
    > The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I've learned that when people don't have any merits to argue, they turn to ridicule. Right back at you buddy. > The difference is humans have a concept of truth, humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) trying to produce something factual. It's pretty naive to think that humans have intent and motivation for the truth, and no others. Just look around you in the world - most communication disregards the truth either carelessly or incidentally (because they are motivated to believe or claim something else) or intentionally (lots of that). > LLMs have no concept of truth, they have no "intent". My calculator app has no intent or concept of truth, but outputs truth pretty reliably.
    - scuff3d 1y ago
      To think that I'm saying all humans intend to produce truth you'd have to intentionally misread my comment. Wikipedia obviously has to deal with bad actors and vandalism, and they have processes in place for that. My point is that the intent matters. Calculators aren't a useful analogy for LLMs. They produce a deterministic output based on a (relatively) narrow range of inputs. The calculations to produce those outputs follow very rigid and well defined rules. LLMs by their very nature are non-deterministic, and the inputs/outputs are far more complicated.

mmooss 1y ago

> where are all those LLMs without the billions upon billions of lines of text written by humans? A not insignificant number coming from Wikipedia? Where is Wikipedia without all the learning and information from other sources, many of which it put out of business? > Also, LLMs don't produce truth. They don't have a concept of it. Or lies for that matter. If you are using LLMs do study something you know nothing about the information provided by them is as good as useless if you don't verify it with external sources written by a person. Wikipedia isn't perfect, nothing is, but I trust their model a shitload more then an LLM. Wikipedia produces consensus that correlates with truth to some degree. LLMs produce statistical output, which in a way is a automated consensus of the LLM's input, that also correlates with truth to some degree - and the correlation is hardly zero. I agree that information has no value if you don't know its accuracy; it's always a sticking point for me. IMHO Wikipedia has the same problem: I have no idea how accurate it is without verifying it with an external source (and when I've done that, I've often been disappointed). Has anyone researched the relative accuracy of Wikipedia and LLMs?

internetter 1y ago
> Where is Wikipedia without all the learning and information from other sources, many of which it put out of business? Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business? You will frequently see a 5k word article used for a couple of sentences in a Wikipedia page, with the entire Wikipedia page itself being smaller than one paper it cites for one small corner of said page. When I’m researching events, I frequently go to Wikipedia to find sources as search engines have a drastically larger recentism bias. > Has anyone researched the relative accuracy of Wikipedia and LLMs No comparative research on this specific topic has been conducted afaik, and most comparative research is aging (likely, to Wikipedia’s own detriment–general consensus is that Wikipedia’s reliability has increased over time). However at the time of research publication, the consensus seems to be that Wikipedia is generally only slightly less reliable than peers in a given field (ie textbooks or británica), although Wikipedia is often less in depth. The most frequently cited study is a 2005 comparison in Nature which found 4 major errors in both Wikipedia and Británica, and 130 minor errors on Británica whereas 160 on Wikipedia. All studies are documented on Wikipedia itself, see [[Reliability of Wikipedia]]. LLMs… do not have this same reputation.
- mmooss 1y ago
  > Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business? Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries, websites, etc. For example, I'm sure it impacts McGraw-Hill's AccessScience, which likely you've never heard of. > This is documented on Wikipedia itself Maybe there's a little bias there? Would Wikipedia accept Wikipedia's analysis of its own reliability as a valid source? I've heard that claim, but having no knowledge of the accuracy of any particular article, it's not worth very much to me. > LLMs… do not have this same reputation. They don't with you, but many people obviously use them that way. Also, reputation does not correlate strongly with reality.
  - internetter 1y ago
    > Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries This just seems like healthy competition. I thought we were talking about a situation where Wikipedia’s use of other encyclopedias is an instrument of their demise. > Maybe there's a little bias there Paradoxically, I suspect you’d be pleasantly surprised about how tough this article is on itself. A lot of attention is given to bias in this case. > Would Wikipedia accept Wikipedia's analysis of its own reliability as a valid source? First, it is not Wikipedia’s own analysis. Editors should not present their own conclusions from research, just what each paper says. See [[WP:SYNTH]]. Second, generally Wikipedia discourages anyone citing it as it is not a stable source of information. Much better is to use the sources the article itself conveniently cites inline. As a general policy citing any encyclopedia is discouraged. > having no knowledge of the accuracy of any particular article, it's not worth very much to me. Wikipedia does have internal metrics grading the quality of an article. [[WP:ASSESS]]. In general though, even entirely discounting the Wikipedia component of the británica comparison, based on británicas own failures it seems wise to verify each and every claim in an encyclopedia, which Wikipedia does an excellent job of helping you do. > They don't with you, but many people obviously use them that way. Also, reputation does not correlate strongly with reality OpenAIs own benchmarks show much higher hallucination rates than any study on Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself is quite close to a ban on LLMs for reliability issues. If you ask literally any layman “has ChatGPT ever been wrong for you” they will say yes, either in that moment or after only a little prompting. It is much harder to elicit such a response regarding Wikipedia in my experience https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f3722c1/o3-and-o4-mini-system-card.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f372...
scuff3d 1y ago
The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I'm surprised you'd bother trying to make a point there. The difference is humans have a concept of truth, humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) trying to produce something factual. Other humans then come along, with similar intent, and verify it. Studies in the past have shown Wikipedia's accuracy rate is roughly on par with traditional encyclopedias, and more importantly sources are clearly documented. Making validation and further research fairly easy. And if something isn't sourced I know immediately it's more suspect. LLMs have no concept of truth, they have no "intent". They just slap words down based on statistics. It is admittedly very impressive how good they are at doing that, but they don't produce truth in any meaningful way, it more a by product. On top of that all its sources get smashed together, making it much more difficult to verify the validity of any given claim. It's also unpredictable, so the exact same prompt could produce truth one time, and a hallucination another (a situation I have run into when it comes to engineering tasks). And worst of all. Not only will an LLM be wrong, but it will be confidently and persuasively wrong.
- mmooss 1y ago
  > The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I've learned that when people don't have any merits to argue, they turn to ridicule. Right back at you buddy. > The difference is humans have a concept of truth, humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) trying to produce something factual. It's pretty naive to think that humans have intent and motivation for the truth, and no others. Just look around you in the world - most communication disregards the truth either carelessly or incidentally (because they are motivated to believe or claim something else) or intentionally (lots of that). > LLMs have no concept of truth, they have no "intent". My calculator app has no intent or concept of truth, but outputs truth pretty reliably.
  - scuff3d 1y ago
    To think that I'm saying all humans intend to produce truth you'd have to intentionally misread my comment. Wikipedia obviously has to deal with bad actors and vandalism, and they have processes in place for that. My point is that the intent matters. Calculators aren't a useful analogy for LLMs. They produce a deterministic output based on a (relatively) narrow range of inputs. The calculations to produce those outputs follow very rigid and well defined rules. LLMs by their very nature are non-deterministic, and the inputs/outputs are far more complicated.