AI's potential risks and benefits are frequent topics of discussion among #technology #leaders and

A new study published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature #MachineIntelligence suggests that #artificialintelligence (#AI) tools may be useful for the verification process used by @Wikipedia contributors and editors. The study, called "Improving Wikipedia Verifiability With AI," suggests that AI can help identify weaker citations in an article and provide potential alternatives. Users preferred the AI substitutes 70 percent of the time, and among Wikipedia's English-speaking users, people preferred the first AI-suggested alternative "twice as often" as the page's initial citation.

The study limited potential alternative citations to web pages and focused on #Wikipedia's English language community. #Researchers also noted that the current speed of AI development could soon pave the way for new tools to surpass the tools they used for their study. The #English Wikipedia had more than 59.2 million pages and more than 6.7 million articles as of Monday, according to the online #encyclopedia's publicly available data.

AI's potential risks and benefits are frequent topics of discussion among #technology #leaders and #politicians alike. While some tech experts say #AI could benefit the healthcare, drug development, and transportation industries, others--including the "Godfather of AI"--are worried that AI could one day outpace human intelligence if guardrails for its development are not established. Several political and tech leaders are expected to convene next month for discussions about AI during the world's first global AI safety summit.

A spokesperson with the @Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that supports #Wikipedia, told @Newsweek that the foundation is exploring ways that generative AI tools could be used. They believe that AI works best as an augmentation for the work that humans do on these projects. Any exploration of leveraging AI tools on the site needs to align with this core position.

As part of the foundation's exploration of generative AI, its teams created an "experimental" #Wikipedia plug-in for @OpenAI, the AI company behind #ChatGPT. It's available to ChatGPT Plus users, who can use it to access up-to-date information from Wikipedia for any general #knowledge query, while attributing and sharing links to the Wikipedia articles from where the information is sourced.