"These tools have made it very easy for bad actors to crowd out good information..."
Recently, I was writing a piece about Nighthawks and wanted to remind myself of some basic information about the companion characters. As I have a thousand times before, I put the question into Google and clicked the first result: the Nighthawks Wiki.
Of course, wikis aren't necessarily reliable, especially fan-run projects that might not have enough engaged individuals to immediately spot and fix errors. But the "Nighthawks Wiki" that I landed on immediately and obviously had deeper issues. Firstly, it wasn't a wiki at all. Rather than being editable by anybody, this website only invited "corrections" by email. Secondly, it was full of false information that didn't seem likely to have been added by fans getting their facts slightly wrong, like listing companions and skills that don't exist. It also regularly included unrelated information about the 1981 movie and the Edward Hopper painting, both of the same name, and listed them in its "sources" even when they had no relevance to the page in question.
I don't like to accuse anybody of using generative AI, because its hallmarks are difficult to pin down and are often misattributed to the LLM rather than the human writers it rips off – ask any of us how much we enjoy the em-dash, for example.
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