AI is rapidly changing the way information is created and shared, but speed and scale do not mean reliability. Jimmy Wells, who co-founded wikipedia – using the intelligence of crowds to overturn traditional encyclopedias such as the Britannica and become the internet’s default reference point – has now found itself at the center of a new debate over trust, including attacks from Elon Musk over alleged bias. Speaking to Rohit Saran and Saikat Dasgupta on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, Wells reflected on the opportunities and risks presented by AI, why neutrality cannot be compromised, and why trust is more important than ever.For centuries, humanity has found itself torn between the promise of tomorrow and its dangers when talking about the future. Socrates died a worried man because he believed that writing would put an end to the pursuit of knowledge. Now it is the same with AI. How do you see it?■ John Philip Sousa (one of America’s most famous musicians) believed that when music began to be recorded, people would no longer sing along. Chess, as a game, is more popular than ever, even though the world’s best chess player is no longer human. That hasn’t stopped people from saying, ‘Oh, but we really enjoy playing chess!’ About AI, since the technology is so new and so accessible, I don’t know. You ask a computer a question and it can answer, it’s incredible. But we also know that it is flawed. And then, there’s this baseless assumption that this will destroy all jobs, or no one will need to work because we’re going to get so rich. Probably the answer, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. AI is obviously going to have a huge impact. It is very difficult to predict right now what this will be.Broadly speaking, the Internet has made information a ‘commodity’. Do you think AI will make intelligence a commodity?■ All I can say is that right now, when we look at big language models – and I use them a lot, I’m a programmer, but not a very good one because I enjoy making things – it’s incredibly helpful and a lot of fun. But it also makes things up and creates confusion. What I’m most interested in right now is, are there ways we can use this technology to support the community? Are there things I can do very well? A lot of discussions on Wikipedia are really long. You can get AI to summarize it. But there is a main point here, I want to read the original. it’s very useful. Another example would be that you would load the Wikipedia article and all the sources and ask if there is anything in the sources that should be on Wikipedia but is not, or anything that is not supported by the sources. I did this and I think it’s potentially useful to the community. Then say I want to write about a Bollywood movie that is not globally famous in Wikipedia and I want to get some basic facts about it. But I cannot read Hindi. Maybe AI can help me.Wikis drive a large number of Google search answers and are now emerging as a source layer for AI. Is LLM both a threat and an opportunity for the future of Wiki?■ We’re really about that human element, the knowledge, the judgment put together by humans. That machine translation may be a grammatical translation, but if you think about the cultural context of the reader, what they need to understand, what they’re likely to know and what you need to explain to them, it goes beyond just the text. My example is, who is the most famous cricket player? Today there can be Virat Kohli in India. But if you’re writing for a global audience, you’ll need to add a little text to explain who he or she is and put it into context. Machine translation can’t do this. But a human being can.You’re really making a case for human moderation of information. Do you think the biggest problem ultimately lies with AI-curated information, a wall it can’t break?■ So, Gary Marcus is an AI researcher who is known as an AI skeptic, although I would say he’s not really an AI skeptic, but thinks that big language models have already kind of hit a wall – that we’re not seeing improvement on a number of key issues like hallucinations. He believes some more fundamental breakthroughs are needed. For a while, scaling seemed to make all the difference. But there are other experts of equal fame who disagree with him. Just looking at it, I think, maybe we’re going to take a little break for a few years until there are more breakthroughs, where it’s like ‘Okay, we’ve got this amazing tool but maybe we’re not that close to the next steps’.Like Google Search in the past, AI companies have had a hostile relationship with the news media – for example, The New York Times sued OpenAI. If AI systems increasingly cite original sources, should they be required to link back and share revenue or traffic?■ I think we’re going to have a big fight over copyright. This is going to happen in legislatures and in the courts, rethinking how copyright law is structured. My concern is that we want to be careful about redundancies. One of the classic principles of copyright law has always been that you can’t copyright facts. Some scientific publishers may be very excited to be able to say that you can’t use the facts unless you pay. And it is a disaster. We don’t want to go there. This hurts Wikipedia and our ability to say that this happened on this date. Here are the sources, and these are five different newspapers. Also newspapers also do not want to go there. A bigger and deeper issue is that local journalism has been ruined. And this happened long before AI. This is a big problem for the society. I’m from Huntsville, Alabama, which is not a very big city, but not small either – 250,000 people. When I was a kid, I was a paper boy. I rode my bike and threw the papers (at houses). As a Wikipedian, the importance of this is that if I want to write about the history of Huntsville or the 1978 mayoral election, I have lots of good material to work with. But if I want to write about the most recent election? Very thin material. Because there is now only one afternoon newspaper published three times a week and from 100 miles away. And that means the first draft of history, which is journalism, is not being written. So, the second format of history, which is Wikipedia, becomes very difficult.How do we solve this?■ I wish I had the answer. In some cases, maybe AI could help, if there was a way to make it possible for one or two journalists to do more work in a useful way that could be good. There are many positive aspects to the change in the information ecosystem, obviously, but there are also some negative ones. So go ahead and test.This debate is going on on Wikipedia between deletionists and inclusionists. Which Side Are You On?■ It’s helped strengthen Wikipedia that we have this active, intellectual dialogue. I always say I’m an ultimateist, meaning that we’ll probably get it wrong a lot of the time but eventually we’ll get it right. The health of the Wikipedia community is important to us. Is the community having active discussions, having fun, behaving well? Are we acting thoughtfully? I’m very comfortable with arguments as long as they don’t just turn into angry shouting matches. Tell us about your Indian community and volunteer group. There is a perception or a misconception, you tell us, that the pages of India are not that tough. ■ I find the Indian Wikipedia community to be similar to that everywhere in the world. A lot of idiots, not necessarily professionals in this field. There is a person in the global community nicknamed Hurricane Hank, who is a weather expert but not a professional meteorologist. Unfortunately, there are more men than women in the community. We always talk about this. We want to improve this around the world. This is my third visit to India in one and a half months. During a trip, I was in Kerala and I met the local Wikipedia group. There was also a couple, both editors of Wikipedia, who had brought their children. As for the second part of your question, I haven’t heard of India pages. I think this would be possible for smaller language versions of Wikipedia. Obviously, those pages will generally be smaller, less cluttered, and less harsh because there are fewer people doing it.When people say, ‘Wikipedia is broken because it’s biased’, how do you respond to that? And what is your opinion about an AI-first competitor like Growikipedia?■ Look, Wikipedia is a source of knowledge, and sources are transparent things. One of the things Elon (Musk) said is that Wikipedia just reflects mainstream propaganda. And I feel like, that’s really weird. Wikipedia reflects what reliable sources say. We can’t take a weird side, and say, ‘Oh, we’re going to fight against all scientific knowledge’, right? But if it is a legitimate debate then we should consider it. Do we have biases? Well, of course, we are human. So, we have to be really careful about it. Remaining neutral is one of the core values of the community. There is no dispute in this. But do we always get it right? Probably not. An old saying I like is that if you ask a fish about water, the fish will say, ‘What kind of water?’ They live in it. They have no information about this. And so sometimes our biases are there just because we don’t know.How important is tonal neutrality for credibility? ■ Amartya Sen has made a comment in the preface of his book ’10 Indians, 12 Opinions’. It’s actually all humans – 10 humans, 12 votes. Tone neutrality is also very important for Wikipedia and newspapers. I live in London and read two newspapers, the Guardian and the Telegraph. The Guardian is sort of center left, the Telegraph is center right. Both quality newspapers. I have an electric car, not a Tesla. I love electric cars and so I’ve read a lot about them. If you cut out the headlines from those two papers, I could probably filter out 90% of the information accurately, because the Guardian loves electric cars and the Telegraph hates them. But because of this tone, I also trust both of them less because it seems that both of them are campaigning for elections. This is a problem because it can undermine trust, not only with people who disagree, but also with people who agree with the tone.You launched WikiTribune to address neutrality in public discussion. Why didn’t you continue?■ The Tribune was an experiment to see if there was a way for journalists and community members to collaborate. What journalists can do, like you have come here to interact with me in the middle of Delhi, or go and report on something, or attend a press conference, or talk to a politician, it is almost impossible to do that as a volunteer. So, we looked for some good collaborations. And then we’ll look at traffic statistics every day. We had a story that was actually titled Clickbait that I didn’t like. To make it commercially successful, we needed more clickbait titles. I did not mean to do it. That’s how I realized that the problem was not with journalism but with that model, the broader ecosystem. Newspapers always love a good, juicy headline. There is nothing wrong in this. But if algorithms are giving people content to keep for as long as possible, it encourages more of the same behavior and so on. So it kind of changed my focus and it was, well, cool experiment.
