https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... rified.png
(TL:DR / spoiler: Biden was 29 when he won, 30 when he took his seat)
The above screenshot was uploaded by Maryana Pinchuk, the Principal Product Manager of the Wikimedia Foundation and their Product Lead for their brand new Citation Needed tool, which is now undergoing its soft launch. This is apparently a Chrome extension people can use to verify claims made on third party websites. The user simply highlights a sentence, and the tool then uses a combination of ChatGPT and Wikipedia to return an "inference suggesting that the claim is un/supported by Wikipedia".
Cool, right? Maybe, maybe not.
A lot might depend on whether you think the people making such things are morons or not.
The screenshot above seems to have been taken during the tool's "internal acceptance testing", and is now being used on the Foundation's Meta-Wiki site to show people what it can do. Perhaps even Google, since the next stage after internal testing was apparently "Extension submitted to and accepted in the Chrome Store".
As you can hopefully see, someone seems to have had the bright idea to test it on the White House's website. Specifically the biography of some bloke called Joe Biden. No, me neither.
They queried the sentence......
The tool surprisingly reports that......At age 29, President Biden became one of the youngest people ever elected to the United States Senate.
The red is a really nice touch. Sadly I can't quite replicate it on the forum.The claim is incorrect as President Biden was actually 30 years old when he became a senator, not 29.
Anyway, well I never, the U.S. government, lying to us?
My faith in all things is shattered. My only rock is the Foundation.
Alas, they are not lying. Biden was 29 years and 11 months old at the time of the election. Which would be the plain meaning of "elected" in this context, even if that horrifies constitutional pedants.
He was thirty when he took his seat. Or the Senate convened. Or whatever the hell the officially correct term is.
So while the claim is correct, because (I can only presume) the AI don't quite understand the question, or is a total pedant, it decided all by itself to reinterpret the question and answer that one instead. What a dick.
Of course, all of this would be obvious to a human reading Wikipedia directly......
The given reference only directly supports sixth youngest, January 1973, minimum age, but I guess the rest is just WP:BLUE or a simple date calculation.At the time of the 1972 election, Biden was 29 years old. He turned 30—the minimum age for a U.S. senator—on November 20, 1972, in time for the Senate term beginning January 3, 1973. At the commencement of his Senate term, Biden was the sixth-youngest U.S. Senator in history.[8]
So maybe if the Foundation sees a role for AI based verification tools, how about starting with one that takes the time and effort of verifying a claim found in Wikipedia against the source given in Wikipedia? If there is one.
I think what really disturbs me is the utterly unrealistic feel of this test case. Which they still got wrong. Who would even be wanting to check this claim? It's not like it's a specific and eye catching claim. It didn't say he was the youngest. And surely even the thickest person on the planet would know that 29, give or take a few years, is right where you would expect the youngest Senators to be, give or take five or ten Senators. I mean, they get C-Span, right? They got eyes, right?
Rather more disturbingly, since I'm British not American, the truly disgusting part of this whole test didn't immediately occur to me. But surely quite a few Americans know it. Biden's wife and daughter were killed in a car crash in the time between his election and taking his seat. He was "sworn in at the hospital where his sons were recovering." It's true because I read it on Wikipedia ("1972 United States Senate election in Delaware"). There is no citation for that statement.
But no matter. Highlighting the text and clicking "web search" led me to a Google result for nytimes.com which said......
Admittedly a rendering of a scan, but I trust it. I trust the Times.WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 (AP) — Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose wife and infant daughter were killed in an automobile accident last month, will be sworn in Friday as a United State Senator from Delaware at a Wilmington hospital where his two sons are recovering from injuries suffered in the crash. Mr. Biden, who reached the required constitutional age of 30 only after he defeated Senator J. Caleb Boggs, is believed to be the first Senator in 30 years to take the oath of office away from the Senate chamber.
