User:LPfi/AI guidelines

This article is an experiment. See the article criteria for guidelines on what subjects are typically given their own articles and use this article's discussion page to explain the purpose for the article and whether the content should (or should not) be merged into another page. Please do not remove this tag until a consensus to do so has been reached on the article/template's discussion page.

Be very careful if you use artificial intelligence (AI). Using AI to find information is OK, but confirm the information yourself. The prose is nearly always better written by yourself, for style and to avoid potential copyright and plagiarism issues.

AI must not be used to quickly create many articles.

If you want to use AI to generate drafts, create them in a sandbox of yours, at most a few at a time. Publish each one when you have checked, copy edited and completed it to a point where it is clearly useful, no unchecked facts remain and the style is satisfactory. If you want to create several such articles, notify the community on your plans in the Pub and wait for the discussion to settle before creating more than a few of them.

If you use AI help in writing an article, you must at least:

• check that there are no hallucinations (AI-invented "facts");
• copy edit any generated text to suit Wikivoyage's style;
• make sure every listing has an url that confirms the added information, and
• verify the existence of any transport service you add.

Computer-generated "photos", "paintings" and "drawings" should not be used on Wikivoyage. For most destinations, there is an abundance of real photos, and we don't want images that picture what the place might look like. Also be careful with computer-modified images

Graphs and similar are rarely used here. If you think one is needed and you create it with AI assistance, you should carefully control the inputs.

When using computer-generated illustrations, notify the community by a thread on the article talk page.

AI tools should not be used in posts on talk pages other than for spelling correction, finding a word, and similar; the original wording should be yours – you should not use the style AI chatbots tend to use. They must not be used to speed up your commenting above that of a typical native speaker – a good rule of thumb is to limit comments in a thread to one or at most a few a day.

Meta:Artificial intelligence/Guidelines describes recommended practices for developing and deploying AI-assisted tools, concerning Wikimedia projects in general, including Wikivoyage. These are relevant for any systematic AI-assisted work.

AI help can be useful for gathering and formatting information, but you need to be very specific on what you want the AI to do to avoid hallucinations. Check the result.

Generative AI tools do invents facts on their own from time to time, such as claiming a beach resort has a restaurant, as they tend to have them. The text or listing created by the AI may sound very convincing – they are programmed to answer as humans would, and have no idea about the concept of uncertainty. You need to check the correctness from actual sources, usually the official site.

Any listing added on the advice of an AI tool should include the official website, and information on distances, transport services etc. should likewise be checked.

Many of the current (as of mid-2020s) AI programs work by applying a large language model to a collection of inputs; they output what would typically be said – and in some cases, they will repeat what has actually been said. This is plagiarism and may violate the copyright of the original author; the legal implications are far from clear. Even if the program works well and there are no legal problems, what you get is some average or mishmash of the inputs, and that is not what Wikivoyage needs.