"The new A.I. chatbots have typically swallowed Wikipedia’s corpus, too. Embedded deep within their responses to queries is Wikipedia data and Wikipedia text, knowledge that has been compiled over years of painstaking work by human contributors. While estimates of its influence can vary, Wikipedia is probably the most important single source in the training of A.I. models. “Without Wikipedia, generative A.I. wouldn’t exist,” says Nicholas Vincent, who will be joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia this month and who has studied how Wikipedia helps support Google searches and other information businesses. Yet as bots like ChatGPT become increasingly popular and sophisticated, Vincent and some of his colleagues wonder what will happen if Wikipedia, out-flanked by A.I. that has cannibalized it, suffers from disuse and dereliction. In such a future, a “Death of Wikipedia” outcome is perhaps not so far-fetched. A computer intelligence — it might not need to be as good as Wikipedia, merely good enough — is plugged into the web and seizes the opportunity to summarize source materials and news articles instantly, the way humans now do with argument and deliberation."