Google’s AI writes biographies in seconds, and Wikipedia is feeling the heat 🤖

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Able to compile information scattered across the web in a matter of seconds, Google’s artificial intelligence is reportedly shaking up the collaborative encyclopedia that long dominated online knowledge. A technological shift that could redefine how biographies get produced.

A biography with no effort ⚡

Google AI, the company’s new artificial intelligence, appears to be gaining ground on Wikipedia. Its edge would lie in how it collects and aggregates data. With no human intervention, it is said to gather everything about a person, whether it comes from social networks, websites or even published books. What once took hours of research and writing would now take a few seconds.

The power of open contribution ✍️

Wikipedia beat Encarta because it let anyone write texts, biographies and summaries. Professionals could publish information under their own names and become reference points in science, research and knowledge, before artificial intelligence took off. Jean Bertrand, a regular on the platform, shares his experience: “I used to handle information and write biographies of people, and when I showed them those biographies, they were happy. So it made them stars, it gave them a certain popularity.” Wikipedia, in short, was a digital space close to its audience, where everyone could express themselves naturally.

Google AI changes the game 🚀

With Google AI, users no longer have to write a single line. A search on a person would be enough for their biography to appear straight away. The AI seems to draw its data from TikTok, Facebook, the person’s published works and many other sites, then stitches it all into one coherent entry. Biographies are becoming almost automated, and everything happens very fast. No more waiting for a contributor to take an interest in you: the machine would work in their place, at any hour, for anyone.

Between fear and fascination 😮

This automation doesn’t leave users indifferent. Marguerite, a sociology student at the University of Yaoundé I in Cameroon, describes what she went through: “I had fun typing in the names of my classmates and that’s how information kept coming up from everywhere, and I was pleasantly surprised. I did it for myself too, and my information appeared right away. I felt a gust of fear, but it also made me very happy to know that I can now be a global star too, without needing anyone to speak about me.”

Her experience shows the two faces of this technology: it offers instant visibility, but it also exposes, in a single click, everything a person has left online.

Toward a new era of knowledge 🌐

If the collaborative encyclopedia democratized how knowledge is written, artificial intelligence could now democratize its instant production. Still, the machine’s speed doesn’t excuse us from asking how reliable the sources it aggregates really are, or where human authorship fits in this new ecosystem. Between human expertise and algorithmic speed, a new page in the history of knowledge is being written, and it now takes only seconds.

So, would you rather read a biography signed by a human or one generated in a second by an AI? Tell us in the comments!