Wikipedia has a new initiative called WikiProject AI Cleanup. It is a task force of volunteers currently combing through Wikipedia articles, editing or removing false information that appears to have been posted by people using generative AI.
Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of the cleanup crew, told 404 Media that the crisis began when Wikipedia editors and users began seeing passages that were unmistakably written by a chatbot of some kind.
A very similar situation to that analysed in this paper that was recently published. The quality of what is generated degrades significantly.
Although they mostly investigate replacing the data with ai generated data in each step, so I doubt the effect will be as pronounced in practice. Human writing will still be included and even curation of ai generated text by people can skew the distribution of the training data (as the process by these editors would inevitably do, as reasonable text could get through the cracks.)
AI model makers are very well aware of this and there is a move from ingesting everything to curating datasets more aggressively. Data prep is something many upstarts have no idea is critical, but everyone is learning about, sometimes the hard way.