[LINK] "Wikipedia Deploys AI to Expand Its Ranks of Human Editors"

[rfmcdonald]

Wikipedia's development of AI editors, noted by Wired's Cade Metz, worries me. If AIs will work there, what role will humans have?

Aaron Halfaker just built an artificial intelligence engine designed to automatically analyze changes to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia anyone can edit. In crowdsourcing the creation of an encyclopedia, the not-for-profit website forever changed the way we get information. It’s among the ten most-visited sites on the Internet, and it has swept tomes like World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica into the dustbin of history. But it’s not without flaws. If anyone can edit Wikipedia, anyone can mistakenly add bogus information. And anyone can vandalize the site, purposefully adding bogus information. Halfaker, a senior research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees Wikipedia, built his AI engine as a way of identifying such vandalism.

In one sense, this means less work for the volunteer editors who police Wikipedia’s articles. And it might seem like a step toward phasing these editors out, another example of AI replacing humans. But Halfaker’s project is actually an effort to increase human participation in Wikipedia. Although some predict that AI and robotics will replace as much as 47 percent of our jobs over the next 20 years, others believe that AI will also create a significant number of new jobs. This project is at least a small example of that dynamic at work.

“This project is one attempt to bring back the human element,” says Dario Taraborelli, Wikimedia’s head of research, “to allocate human attention where it’s most needed.”