Its because there's no accountability for cybercrimes. If humans always had a button to burn down libraries, I'm sure they would have. Instead they had to put themselves in harms way to do such things.

People do things cause they can, and fucking with Wikipedia is apparently simple.

State actors could be interested in doing that. Same with the internet archive attacks.

historically humans aren't usually burning down libraries on purpose.

How on earth have you come to this conclusion.

historically humans aren't usually burning down libraries on purpose.

Sometimes they are, Baghdad springs to mind, I'm sure there are other examples. And this library is online so there's less chance of getting caught with a can of petrol and a box of matches.

Then there's every authoritarian regime that tries to ban or burn specific types of books. What we're seeing here could be more like that - an attempt to muddy the waters or introduce misinformation on certain topics.

Florida says hello. A bunch of other places too, sadly:-(.

Because basement losers can't conquer and raze libraries to the ground.

The internet has shown that assumed anonymity result in people fucking with other people's lives for the hell of it. Viruses, trolling, etc. This is just the next stage of it because of a new easy to use tool.

The digital dark age will be a real thing, absolutely.

Interesting idea on a sea of alternative histories. That might be a possible threat.
Someone else here called it "AI text apocalypse". I like that term.

The vast majority of people think they're the good guys...

“[The] main reasons that motivate editors to add AI-generated content: self-promotion, deliberate hoaxing, and being misinformed into thinking that the generated content is accurate and constructive,”

I think the main driver behind people misinformed about AI content comes from the fact that outside of tech people, most have no idea that AI will:

1. 100% make up answers to things it doesn't know because either the sample size of data they have ingested was to small or was bad. And it will do this with the same robot confidence you get for any other answer.

2. AI that has been fed to much other AI generated content will begin to "hallucinate" and give some wild outputs, very similar to humans suffering from schizophrenia. And again these answers will be given as "fact" with the same robotic confidence.

For the uninitiated like me:

The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect,[1][2] collisional cascading, or ablation cascade), proposed by NASA scientists Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is numerous enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.

Wikipedia link.

"[The] main reasons that motivate editors to add AI-generated content: self-promotion, deliberate hoaxing, and being misinformed into thinking that the generated content is accurate and constructive," Lebleu said.

People suck

The irony being a huge amount of the llm knowledge was based on WP in the first place, that and scientific papers.

Hopefully they tightened things up after the Scots incident.

Well, for everything except fictional articles. Thats the hardest for them, historically

See also: model collapse

(Which is more or less just regression towards the mean with more steps)

Yes, this is what many of us worry will become the internet in general. AI content generated on from AI trained on AI garbage.

AI bots can trivially outpace humans.

Eventually every article just reads "Delve delve delve delve delve delve delve."

Or download it in a bunch of other ways directly from Wikipedia.

They used to be contained, every village has their idiot. Now that the internet is the global village, all the formerly isolated idiots have a place to chat.

The signal to noise ratio is so low these days. There's so much information out there but everyone wants to profit from you before you can get it. Even worse, the people with good information generally can't buy as big a megaphone as the people who profit from lying to you.

Honestly, I think humans have been more likely to believe an easy lie than a hard truth all along, but it's easier than ever these days.

the name is Altman.