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In early 2021, a Wikipedia editor peered into the future and saw what looked like a funnel cloud on the horizon: the rise of GPT-3, a precursor to the new chatbots from OpenAI. When this editor \u2014 a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the handle Barkeep49 on the site \u2014 gave the new technology a try, he could see that it was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements (a false name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual and coherent answers. But he had no doubts about its potential. \u201cI think A.I.\u2019s day of writing a high-quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later,\u201d he wrote in \u201cDeath of Wikipedia,\u201d an essay that he posted under his handle on Wikipedia itself. He speculated that a computerized model could, in time, displace his beloved website and its human editors, just as Wikipedia had supplanted the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which in 2012 announced it was discontinuing its print publication.\n\nRecently, when I asked this editor if he still worried about his encyclopedia\u2019s fate, he told me that the newer versions made him more convinced that ChatGPT was a threat. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t surprise me if things are fine for the next three years,\u201d he said of Wikipedia, \u201cand then, all of a sudden, in Year 4 or 5, things drop off a cliff.\u201d