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Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions
(www.howtogeek.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Saved you a click:
AIbros: we're creating God!!!
AI users: it can do translation & reformating pretty well but you got to check it's not chatting shit
The takeaway from all LLM-based AI is the user needs to be smart enough to do whatever they're asking anyway. All output needs to be verified before being used or relied upon.
The "AI" is just streamlining the process to save time.
Relying on it otherwise is stupid and just proves instantly that you are incompetent.
I'm gonna say that's ideal but not quite necessary. What's needed is that the user is capable of properly verifying the output. Which anyone who could do it themselves definitely can, but it can be done more broadly. It's an easier skill to verify a result than it is to obtain that result. Think: how film critics don't necessarily need to be filmmakers, or the P=NP question in computer science.
But if the output has issues, what're you going to do, prompt it again? If you are only able to verify but not do the task, you cannot correct the AI's mistakes yourself.
At the risk of sounding like an overly obsequious AI… You know what, you're completely right. I'm honestly not sure what use case I was imagining when I wrote that last comment.
Making text flow naturally, grouping and ordeeing information, good writing.
You can verify two textst have the same facts and information, yet one reads way better than the other. But writing a text that reads well is quite hard.
I can't draw, but I could probably photoshop out some minor issues in an AI-generated image.
I don't think AI users would say it does reformatting either (if they're honest): If you tell a chatbot to reformat text without changing it, it will change the text, because it does not understand the concept of not changing text. It should only take one time for someone to get burned for them to learn that lesson.
Fucking hate those anti human filth pushing slop into everything. I want to take one apart with power tools.
Damn that movie was funny. I need to rewatch it.
It holds up better than any movie from the late 90s that I can think of.
Seems pretty reasonable to use it as a grammar checker. As long as it's not changing content, just form or readability, that seems like a pretty decent use for it, at least with a purely educational resource like Wikipedia.
To save you another few clicks: this is the discussion (RfC) that implemented the changes, and the policy is linked at the top.
So, it should be used reasonably, as it should have always been.
Liar. I already read the article before opening the comments. YOU SAVED ME NOTHING.
;-)
Seems like there should be a third exception. For those occasions where the article is about LLM generated text. They should be able to quote it when it's appropriate for an article.
That is a reasonable exception to no-AI policies in research papers and newspaper articles, but not for Wikipedia. As a tertiary source, Wikipedia has a strict "no original research" policy. Using AI to provide examples of AI output would be original research, and should not be done.
Quoting AI output shared in primary and secondary sources should be allowed for that reason, though.
Wikipedia probably wants to sell access to LLMs to train. It’s only valuable if Wikipedia remains a high-quality, slop-free source.
I think even AI zealots think there should be silos of content to train from that are fully human generated. Training slop on slop makes the slop even worse.
Sell licenses of what? It's already all in the creative commons iirc.
The content is CC licensed, but they are trying to block AI scraping because it overloads their servers. They have a paid API that uses a lot less compute for both Wikipedia and the AI, as well as being a revenue source for Wikipedia.
This was only done because the editors pushed to minimize AI involvement. There's a comment here already mentioning that: https://lemmy.world/comment/22826863
AI already trains on Wikipedia.
https://commoncrawl.org/