First thing. When AI chatbots first became available for private use, there was a fashion among my friends and colleagues in the academic world to ask a bot to compose their scholarly biography. The results were hysterically inaccurate, being composed of bits of actual fact embedded in largely confabulated narratives, with invented positions held, honors received, publications, and personal details as well. We laughed, but it was also more than a little scary: what if such bots were let loose on our public records?
Second thing. I have had a Wikipedia page for some years now. It was factual, and contained some things that are especially important to me, including a comment about my role in mentoring students (this was a significant part of my professorial life, in which I was able to encourage often-disregarded students — women, working-class students, black students, older students, lgbt students), and a mention of my most significant academic honor, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; last time I looked, the page had not yet been revised to include my most recent honor, the creation of the Linguistic Society of America’s (annual) Arnold Zwicky Award, which “recognizes LGBTQ+ linguists who have made significant contributions to the discipline, the Society, or the wider LGBTQ+ community through scholarship, outreach, service, and/or teaching”.
The confluence of the two things. This morning I had occasion to check out my Wikipedia page (intending to recommend it to a Princeton classmate as source of information about me), only to discover that it had been rewritten by a chatbot, which had of course fucked it up. My mentoring and my American Academy election were gone, and other parts of my life, personal and academic, were worked into a strange fiction (some details to come below), As with the bot-created scholarly biographies, it was possible to track down the sources of the misinformation, but very hard to see how to get any of this corrected, especially since the bot cited actual sources as backup for its mangled claims. (That is, real sources, but bizarrely interpreted by the bot. How can they be challenged? This is not the way Wikipedia was supposed to work.)
I can see no way out of this except to have my Wikipedia page deleted. Better nothing than this shit. Here I confess ignorance: what do I do to have my page deleted? Can any of my readers offer me solid advice?
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