Papers › The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia

The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia

10 Oct 2024arXiv:2410.08044archive 2025-07-28

Creston Brooks, Samuel Eggert, Denis Peskoff

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.

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Syntology Ran 7 of 8 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 1 has no recorded run. Of those that ran: 7 ran with no contract checked.

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clean_text brooksca3/wiki_collection/eval/binoculars/run_wiki_binoculars.py official repository ran fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 722efc24678ccc7e · report
count_sentences brooksca3/wiki_collection/misc/get_footnotes.py official repository ran fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 7d0f4a21df5e8836 · report
count_words brooksca3/wiki_collection/misc/get_hyperlinks.py official repository ran fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 95141547985bc194 · report
extract_title_text_and_url brooksca3/wiki_collection/eval/binoculars/run_wiki_binoculars.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · 8f1c7ab494f336c6 · report
is_long_enough brooksca3/wiki_collection/scraping/reddit/run_reddit_scrape.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · 61e3d0ec37d596c8 · report
load_processed_titles brooksca3/wiki_collection/eval/gptzero/run_wiki_gptzero.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · a2f3483d8418b062 · report
scrape_wikipedia_article brooksca3/wiki_collection/scraping/wikipedia/run_wiki_scrape.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · 9a92bce857a61768 · report
validate_country_urls brooksca3/wiki_collection/scraping/un_articles/helper_scripts/validate_country_url.py official repository unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 9c40755f43c8976e · report

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-3Layer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight Decay

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