Vocal backlash forces Wikipedia to pause AI-generated summaries

AI-generated summaries are low-hanging fruit for apps and services that want to jump on the AI bandwagon, as we’ve seen with Copilot, Google Drive, Amazon, and Adobe Acrobat. Recently, even the Wikimedia Foundation gave it a go with AI summaries in Wikipedia.

Now, however, 404 Media reports that those plans have been put on hold after facing heavy criticism from Wikipedia’s human volunteer editors. You can read the editors’ discussion here.

Some responded with a simple but straightforward “Yuck.” while others wrote thoughtful analyses, explaining how the AI-generated summaries could do immediate and lasting damage to Wikipedia’s reputation as a serious, trustworthy, hand-crafted resource.

The idea was that these AI-generated summaries would appear at the tops of articles in tabs that users had to manually open, and would be marked with a warning that summaries were unverified.

It remains to be seen whether the Wikimedia Foundation will shelve the AI-generated summary feature for good or whether they’ll rework it in a way that satisfies editors before testing again.