The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia

Creston Brooks, Samuel Eggert, Denis Peskoff


Abstract
The rise of AI-generated content in popular information sources raises significant concerns about accountability, accuracy, and bias amplification. Beyond directly impacting consumers, the widespread presence of this content poses questions for the long-term viability of training language models on vast internet sweeps. We use GPTZero, a proprietary AI detector, and Binoculars, an open-source alternative, to establish lower bounds on the presence of AI-generated content in recently created Wikipedia pages. Both detectors reveal a marked increase in AI-generated content in recent pages compared to those from before the release of GPT-3.5. With thresholds calibrated to achieve a 1% false positive rate on pre-GPT-3.5 articles, detectors flag over 5% of newly created English Wikipedia articles as AI-generated, with lower percentages for German, French, and Italian articles. Flagged Wikipedia articles are typically of lower quality and are often self-promotional or partial towards a specific viewpoint on controversial topics.
Anthology ID:
2024.wikinlp-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing Natural Language Processing for Wikipedia
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Lucie Lucie-Aimée, Angela Fan, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Isaac Johnson, Fabio Petroni, Daniel van Strien
Venue:
WikiNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
67–79
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wikinlp-1.12
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Creston Brooks, Samuel Eggert, and Denis Peskoff. 2024. The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing Natural Language Processing for Wikipedia, pages 67–79, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia (Brooks et al., WikiNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wikinlp-1.12.pdf