The most famous online encyclopedia signed agreements with Amazon, Meta and Microsoft for content distribution.
It’s not just newspapers. THE Wikipedia is also suffering from the invasion of Artificial Intelligence (IA) in the contents.
Over recent times, essentially from the end of 2022 (creation of ChatGPT), the free platform came under a pressure biggest: a AI uses Wikipedia content to train its data models.
“The great AI linguistic models have been hammer ours servers. So we’ve been encouraging them to sign up and use our business products so we can feed them,” commented Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
Jimmy justified the news in this way: Wikipedia announced new partnerships with AI technology companies such as Amazon, Meta or Microsoft.
The idea is: “You know what? In fact, they cannot simply destroy our website. You have to enter correctly“, quote or .
It’s just that the great language models (LLM) became among the biggest users of Wikipedia content, with constant pressure on the platform’s servers.
According to Jimmy Wales, AI companies that rely on Wikipedia content should contribute more for its maintenance.
“We’re trying to work with these companies to basically say they’re using Wikipedia, like everyone needs Wikipedia. Because it’s human-curated knowledge, you should probably chip in and pay your fair share of the cost that you’re putting on us,” Wales said.
“I would say that most data sources, including a tracker we manage, show that people are becoming more dependent on Wikipedia at a time when major language models and many AI tools are also using Wikipedia to help provide answers,” added Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit foundation behind Wikipedia, ensures that Public donations are to support free access for readers – they do not fund commercial development of AI.
“They are not making donations to subsidize these big AI companies”, assured Wales.
These agreements join a partnership with Google, and other partnerships with Anthropic, Perplexity and Mistral AI or Ecosia.
