Wikipedia founder: ChatGPT writing Wikipedia articles is completely unreliable

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales believes that the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT developed by OpenAI is a mess when it comes to writing Wikipedia articles.

The founder of the free online encyclopedia said in an interview with European News Channel Next that ChatGPT-4 is “terrible” and “completely unusable” when writing Wikipedia articles.

Wales noted that ChatGPT-4 “misses a lot, misstates a lot of facts in a way that makes sense, makes up some sources, and is just a complete mess.”

Wales believes that superhuman AI may take at least fifty years to achieve.

Will Wikipedia use AI in the future? Wales isn’t too interested in current generative AI models, but he’s open to considering the possibility of using AI to power Wikipedia.

He believes that if there is an AI tool that can find errors in a Wikipedia article by comparing it with the sources it is based on, then AI can play an important role in reducing inaccurate information on the platform.

Wales said Wikipedia is willing to work with an open source AI company as long as it is freely available and adheres to Wikipedia’s principles. However, he noted that there are currently no concrete plans. He said: “Most businesses, not just charities like ours, would say if you’re going to put a technology that’s controlled by someone else at the heart of your business, you have to be very, very careful because if they go A different direction and your entire business could be at risk.”