Everyone's sharing this WikiEdu article about LLMs and Wikipedia so I guess I will too, here's some money quotes:
Our fundamental conclusion about generative AI is: Wikipedia editors should never copy and paste the output from generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT into Wikipedia articles.
we were expecting these [LLM-generated] articles to contain citations to sources that didn’t exist, but this wasn’t true: only 7% of the articles had fake sources. The rest had information cited to real, relevant sources.
Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered: More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification. That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.
It's very interesting to read about how they detected AI-generated text and how they evaluated the accuracy of the tool they used; also, what specific tasks contributors found LLMs useful for. They also note that intervening early with new Wikipedia contributors greatly reduced AI-generated content.
In conclusion, what he said.