Since we were old enough to use Google, Gen Z has been told Wikipedia is unreliable. I remember sitting criss-crossed on the floor of my elementary school classroom, listening to my teacher lecture about how, since anyone on the internet can edit a Wikipedia page, it shouldn’t be trusted. To this day, I’ve seldom seen a friend use the internet’s most prolific encyclopedia, and admitting you learned something on the site seems downright shameful.
How is it, then, that we can so proudly whip out our laptops and ask anything of ChatGPT? Why do we so readily hand our intellectual growth over to artificial intelligence instead of divulging in the real, collective intelligence of hundreds of thousands of people? Especially as students, who rely more and more on quick fixes and shortcuts to their work, we would be better off consulting the library of Wikipedia than becoming dependent on ChatGPT’s expedience.
ChatGPT, like most internet services — from Instagram to ad placement — is built to maximize the user experience, and thus it provides instantaneous and highly specified answers to the exact questions asked of it. This user-friendly model has helped transform OpenAI into a company worth half a trillion dollars. Using ChatGPT feels like having a private conversation, as the program takes the burden of thinking off the user’s shoulders by searching the web and synthesizing vast swaths of information into the desired format.
In comparison, the act of scrolling through a Wikipedia page feels impossibly antiquated. Though most entries are concise and cogent, a reader still has to parse through extra information as they decide what is relevant to their research question. In other words, doing the work of a machine. But the ability to identify important information in a text is a vital skill, and our docile embrace of the automated alternative shows just how quickly we are losing it.
We were cautioned against Wikipedia as children because it is a product of human efforts and, therefore, susceptible to human error. However, its humanity is precisely the source of Wikipedia’s beauty. The website is a pinnacle of epistemology and a record of our achievement. It is effectively a digital Library of Alexandria. As a nonprofit and crowdfunded venture, Wikipedia represents humanity’s search for knowledge for knowledge’s sake, while ChatGPT, as the product of the most valuable private company in the world, benefits from generating revenue first, and accountability or accuracy second. Accordingly, it often hallucinates information and provides fake citations. Wikipedia entries, however, are accompanied by an extensive list of — often reputable or scholarly — citations.
Since Wikipedia represents a community of shared human knowledge, information can almost always be followed to its source. ChatGPT, however, is so highly individualized that the program gives different answers every time the same question is asked. AI-generated answers are ephemeral, while the archive of Wikipedia is forever. Or at least, as long as the internet will house it. Wikipedia serves as an infinitely peer-reviewed, constantly updated trail of information, while ChatGPT cannot be held accountable for its overconfident and inconsistent answers.
ChatGPT has become not only students’ academic crutch, but, for most, their default search engine and, for some, a friend. Generative AI’s disastrous environmental impacts and likely acceleration of Gen Z’s loneliness epidemic are two ramifications of our reliance on the tool, but the loss of our ability to think for ourselves is worse. Scrolling Wikipedia is, at the most basic level, a form of academic research: It requires a little bit of hunting to find what’s relevant and some critical thinking to connect the dots between topics. It doesn’t just tell you what you want to hear. Since ChatGPT tailors its information output to precisely fit the question asked, we are shielded from everything outside of the premise of our question — anything we don’t want to know. And, if we don’t do our due diligence, we won’t even notice that this convenient stream of knowledge is too good to be true.
Despite this, we have come to trust ChatGPT more than we trust each other. Maybe it’s because we’ve demonized Wikipedia since childhood, or maybe we’re just used to carrying our best friends around in our pockets, but we’ve started to turn first to machines instead of the product of others’ ingenuity. While, of course, Wikipedia is still subject to error and bias, as a richly concentrated form of other sources, it is a legitimate and effective starting point for research. It shouldn’t be the final word, but a place to discover the threads of inquiry that we can follow into deeper learning. So next time you’re looking to summarize a reading or skip out on your homework, close that ChatGPT tab and pull up Wikipedia.
Isabella Gardiner ’28 can be reached at isabella_gardiner@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
