AI Is Killing Wikipedia's Human Traffic

They should have an AI RAG mode where AI can look things up and get their facts straight.

shit search function

virtue signaling and identity politics

increadably questionable financial expenditure

and now AI

are blighting what should be the crowning achivement of human knowledge

I think we should focus more on how we can reward people who create high quality content rather than focusing where the exact traffic goes or redirecting. Otherwise you are going to deliver poor UX in order to gain more traffic for absurd reasons.

However if something is used as a source by natural text search, perhaps it would at least be fair to mark some sort of hit to that in other ways where deals would be made for rewarding that.

The ideal and fairest to me seems that there must be some sort of taxation/royalty type percentage coming through for what is verified as high quality content. E.g. Google needs to mark down what content and how much it used for training and content that is used as source and keep aggregated statistics, pay out a certain percentage from the profits or percentage of costs that it takes to generate tokens if no profits.

Maybe there are better ideas, these are just few top of mind. Since generating tokens is costly, adding 10 percent on top of it, doesn't seem that significant and could be used to reward the content creators proportionally.

> especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content

It’s wild how often a Google summary asserts something, I click through to the cited Wikipedia link, and the article says the exact opposite.

I’m very much an AI optimist these days, but product decisions (like elevating weaker models to the top of search results) are making the world epistemically worse right now.

Wikipedia used to be the tl;dr substitute for reading real sources, and now people are being trained to rely on a further level of summarization from that, this time with opacity and motivated by profit. Imagine telling the 2012 HN community we'd get to that place in 2025 and it would be widely accepted here. You'd get laughed off the site.