<
https://www.404media.co/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles/>
"Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of
contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles
into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI
“hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.
The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of
generative AI across the internet from diminishing the reliability of the
world’s largest repository of knowledge. The incident also reveals how even
well-intentioned efforts to expand Wikipedia are prone to errors when they rely
on generative AI, and how they’re remedied by Wikipedia’s open governance
model.
The issue in this case starts with an organization called the Open Knowledge
Association (OKA), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving Wikipedia
and other open platforms.
“We do so by providing monthly stipends to full-time contributors and
translators,” OKA’s site says. “We leverage AI (Large Language Models) to
automate most of the work.”
The problem is that editors started to notice that some of these translations
introduced errors to articles. For example, a draft translation for a Wikipedia
article about the French royal La Bourdonnaye family cites a book and specific
page number when discussing the origin of the family. A Wikipedia editor, Ilyas
Lebleu, who goes by Chaotic Enby on Wikipedia, checked that source and found
that the specific page of that book “doesn't talk about the La Bourdonnaye
family at all.”
“To measure the rate of error, I actually decided to do a spot-check, during
the discussion, of the first few translations that were listed, and already
spotted a few errors there, so it isn't just a matter of cherry-picked cases,”
Lebleu told me. “Some of the articles had swapped sources or added unsourced
sentences with no explanation, while 1879 French Senate election added
paragraphs sourced from material completely unrelated to what was written!”
As Wikipedia editors looked at more OKA-translated articles, they found more
issues."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
