LLMs are the collective becoming the absolute individual
2025-06-12 17:53:46 +01:00 by Mark Smith
There‘s an interesting thing happening over at Wikipedia. There was a big revolt by it‘s editors about a new feature that used LLMs to create summaries of Wikipedia pages. Lots of very interesting comments from editors, but this one stood out to me:
“Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don't think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”
I‘ve been exploring topics related to the theme of the collective vs the individual for a few days. It seems to me that this editor nails the main issue, namely that the LLMs are the logical conclusion of the collective winning over the individual. And with that win, the contradiction is layed bare - the collective in now an individual, and it doesn‘t like it. What a suprise.
Tough to be a leftist when you win. The only way out is to pretend you haven‘t won. It‘s a real problem. For everyone. #