Wikimedia's CTO: In the age of AI, human contributors still matter

It is undeniable that technological advances and cultural shifts have transformed our online universe over the years--especially with the recent surge in AI-generated content--but Deckelmann still isn't afraid of people on the internet. She believes they are its future. In the summer of 2022, when she stepped into the newly created role of CPTO, Deckelmann didn't know that a few months later, the race to build generative AI would accelerate to a breakneck pace. With the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT and other large language models, and the multibillion-dollar funding cycle that followed, 2023 became the year of the chatbot. And because these models require heaps of cheap (or, preferably, even free) content to function, Wikipedia's tens of millions of articles have become a rich source of fuel. To anyone who's spent time on the internet, it makes sense that bots and bot builders would look to Wikipedia to strengthen their own knowledge collections.