Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-26/Op-Ed
Wikipedia as an anchor of truth
Wikipedia has been criticized as being inherently unreliable, and we ourselves warn users not to rely uncritically on the information in Wikipedia; it is ironic to see it now used as an anchor of truth in a seething sea of disinformation. AI models are prone to hallucinating, that is, giving false answers with confidence and corroborative detail to things that simply are untrue. Can using Wikipedia help to at least spot these mistakes, and are the new search engine AIs using them in ways that will actually help prevent hallucination?
DuckAssist and Wikipedia
Following in the footsteps of Bing, the Internet search engine DuckDuckGo has rolled out DuckAssist, a new feature that generates natural language responses to search queries. When a user asks DuckDuckGo a question, DuckAssist can pop up and use neural networks to create an instant answer, a concise summary of answers found on the Web.
A problem plaguing
Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, explained in a company blog post how DuckAssist uses sourcing to Wikipedia and other sources to get around this problem.[1]
“ | DuckAssist answers questions by scanning a specific set of sources – for now that's usually Wikipedia, and occasionally related sites like Britannica – using DuckDuckGo's active indexing. Because we're using natural language technology from OpenAI and Anthropic to summarize what we find in Wikipedia, these answers should be more directly responsive to your actual question than traditional search results or other Instant Answers. | ” |
Keeping AI agents honest
The problem of keeping AI agents honest is far from solved. The somewhat glib reference to Wikipedia is not particularly reassuring. Experience has shown that even AI models trained on the so-called "Wizard of Wikipedia", a large dataset with conversations directly grounded with knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia,
References
- ^ Weinberg, Gabriel (March 8, 2023). "DuckDuckGo launches DuckAssist: a new feature that generates natural language answers to search queries using Wikipedia". spreadprivacy.com. DuckDuckGo. Retrieved March 9, 2023.
- ^ Emily Dinan; Stephen Roller; Kurt Shuster; Angela Fan; Michael Auli; Jason Weston (28 September 2018). "Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational Agents". ICLR 2019 (International Conference on Learning Representations). Retrieved 11 April 2023.
- S2CID 250242329. Retrieved 11 April 2023.
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