Mentions Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation, stewards of the finest projects on the web, have written about the hammering their servers are taking from the scraping bots that feed large language models.

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When we talk about the unfair practices and harm done by training large language models, we usually talk about it in the past tense: how they were trained on other people’s creative work without permission. But this is an ongoing problem that’s just getting worse.

The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.

If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for something. Don’t pretend it’s somehow being technologically open-minded to continuously search for nails to hit with the latest “AI” hammers.

If you’re going to use generative tools powered by large language models, don’t pretend you don’t know how your sausage is made.

The Heritage Foundation sent the pitch deck outlining the Wikipedia initiative to Jewish foundations and other prospective supporters of Project Esther, its roadmap for fighting antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The slideshow says the group’s  “targeting methodologies” would include creating fake Wikipedia user accounts to try to trick editors into identifying themselves by sharing personal information or clicking on malicious tracking links that can identify people who click on them. It is unclear whether this has begun.

Tamzin Hadasa Kelly, a prolific Wikipedia editor, said that the methods mentioned in the Heritage document were familiar, and that Wikipedia editors know that it can be difficult to maintain their anonymity.

“It’s scary they want to do this, but it’s not a ‘zero day,’” Kelly said in an interview, referring to the hacking methods that the intended victim is unaware of before they occur.

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A well-funded campaign against individual Wikipedia editors by an organization like the Heritage Foundation, which is one of the most prominent conservative think tanks in the country, it seems, would be a first.

Molly White, an independent journalist and Wikipedia contributor who wrote an article last week describing “the right’s war on Wikipedia,” said Heritage’s plan to target editors was concerning: “The document is sort of vague about what they would do once they ID a person,” she noted, “but the things that come to mind are not great.”