Samuel Eggert


2024

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The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia
Creston Brooks | Samuel Eggert | Denis Peskoff
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing Natural Language Processing for Wikipedia

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.