The rise of artificial intelligence brings many benefits, including making certain everyday tasks easier. However, it also has several negative effects.
Indeed, ChatGPT is killing a website that we have all used in our lives which is none other than Wikipedia. It must be said that according to a survey, there are more internet users using ChatGPT than this online encyclopedia, which is bad news.
A growth that never stops
Launched in 2022, ChatGPT, which now displays live products, became the first web application to reach 100 million users in just two months. And recently, a study conducted by GWI, a British analysis firm specializing in audiences and relayed on Reddit, specifies that audiences have been declining since 2020 for Wikipedia while OpenAI's artificial intelligence continues to grow.
[OC] ChatGPT now has more monthly users than Wikipedia
byu/spicer2 in dataisbeautiful
Worse still, ChatGPT's user base surpassed Wikipedia's in the first quarter of 2024. According to GWI expert Chris Beer, the AI saw a "36% increase in users between Q4 2023 and Q4 2024, while other online platforms either stayed the same or saw a small percentage increase or decrease. It's reaching more of the internet, faster, than almost any other platform in history."
But that's not all, as the software is more popular across a variety of industries. geographical, according to Beer: “According to our research, ChatGPT is actually particularly popular in the Global South. The markets where we are seeing the highest adoption are Kenya, India, the United Arab Emirates, and Brazil."
A bleak future for Wikipedia?
For its part, the online encyclopedia does not appear to be experiencing a significant drop in its audiences. Indeed, a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told our colleagues at Futurism that the organization had not observed a "significant drop in traffic to Wikimedia websites since the beginning of 2021."
He also added the following on this subject: "Our analyses show that Wikipedia page views are around 15 billion (B) per month (they have been consistently between 15 and 18 billion since October 2020, with occasional increases and decreases in the traffic)”.
In other words, audiences remain stable and data from web traffic estimator SimilarWeb seems to confirm this. Indeed, Wikipedia is currently ranked tenth in the world, while ChatGPT is ranked sixth.
ChatGPT Wikipedia ranking
However, the reason for this decline in the face of artificial intelligence is linked to the addition of new features, according to Chris Beer: “I think Wikipedia’s long-term downward trend is largely due to search engines adding “zero-click” answers. Whereas before, a Wikipedia page could appear at the top of the results, we are now more likely to find a weather forecast, the height of a celebrity, or anything else, directly on Google”.
Nevertheless, if AI takes up more and more space, to the detriment of sites that rocked our childhood and adolescence, one thing will not be replaced. And it concerns the work of the volunteers of this online encyclopedia and the veracity of the information that can be found there.
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