Small edits, large models: How Wikipedia advocacy shapes LLM values (opens in new tab)

Can a small group of volunteers shape how AI systems discuss animal welfare, just by editing Wikipedia? We show that they can. Wikipedia appears in nearly every major language model training dataset and is weighted more heavily than web-crawled text. The Pro-Animal Wikipedians (PAW), a group of advocates who add sourced animal welfare content to relevant articles, have made 125 edits across 115 pages. Using gradient-based data attribution (Ber...