Wikipedians Believed AI Would Come and Go. They Were Wrong

Already in 2018 Google was training AI to write “Wikipedia-like articles,” and by October 2024, a Princeton University study found that about 5 percent of nearly 3,000 newly created articles on English Wikipedia in a single month (August 2024) contained a substantial amount of AI-generated content. There were signs. ChatGPT was fond of em dashes—parenthetical statements that look like this one—and curly quotation marks. Sometimes, residues from the prompts used to compose articles were left behind (“Here is your Wikipedia…