[HN Gopher] Tim Bray on Grokipedia
___________________________________________________________________
Tim Bray on Grokipedia
Author : Bogdanp
Score : 95 points
Date : 2025-10-31 21:41 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tbray.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tbray.org)
| tptacek wrote:
| Why give it oxygen?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's great idea to share knowledge bases collected and curated
| by LLMs.
|
| Amazing that Musk did it first. (Although it was suggested to
| him as part of an interview a month before release).
|
| These systems are very good at finding obscure references that
| were overlooked by mere mortals.
| simonw wrote:
| "It's great idea to share knowledge bases collected and
| curated by LLMs"
|
| Is it though?
|
| LLMs are great at answering questions based on information
| you make available to them, especially if you have the
| instincts and skill to spot when they are likely to make
| mistakes and to fact-check key details yourself.
|
| That doesn't mean that using them to _build_ a knowledge base
| itself is a good idea! We need reliable, verified knowledge
| bases that LLMs can make use-of.
| smcin wrote:
| Crucial to distinguish between knowledge, fact, claim and
| allegation. Compare:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk#Assassination
|
| https://grokipedia.com/page/Charlie_Kirk : Assassination
| Details and Investigation
|
| This is an active case that has not gone to trial, and the
| alleged text messages and Discords have not had their
| forensics cross-examined. Yet Grokipedia is already citing
| them as fact, not allegation. (What is considered the
| correct neutral way to report on alleged facts in active
| cases?)
| jayd16 wrote:
| > collected and curated by LLMs.
|
| Wah? LLMs don't collect things.
|
| I mean, if any of these AI companies want to open up all
| their training data as a searchable archive, I'd be all for
| it.
| meowface wrote:
| To play devil's advocate: Grok has historically actually been
| one of the biggest debunkers of right-wing misinformation and
| conspiracy theories on Twitter, contrary to popular conception.
| Elon keeps trying to tweak its system prompt to make it less
| effective at that, but Grokipedia was worth an initial look
| from me out of curiosity. It took me 10 seconds to realize it
| was ideologically-motivated garbage and significantly more
| right-biased than Wikipedia is left-biased.
|
| (Unfortunately, Reply-Grok may have been successfully partially
| lobotomized for the long term, now. At the time of writing, if
| you ask grok.com about the 2020 election it says Biden won and
| Trump's fraud claims are not substantiated and have no merit.
| If you @grok in a tweet it now says Trump's claims of fraud
| have significant merit, when previously it did not. Over the
| past few days I've seen it place way too much charity in right-
| wing framings in other instances, as well.)
| pstuart wrote:
| The problem of debunking right-wing misinformation is that it
| doesn't seem to matter. The consumers of that misinformation
| _want it_ and those of us who think it 's bad for society
| already know that its garbage.
|
| It feels like we've reached Peak Stupidity but it's clear it
| can (and likely will) get much worse with AI videos.
| bawolff wrote:
| I think there is a problem sometimes that "debunkers" are
| often more interested in scoring points with secondary
| audiences (i.e. people who already agree with them) than
| actually convincing the people who believe the
| misinformation.
|
| Most people who believe bullshit were convinced by
| something. It might not have been fully rational but there
| is usually a kernel of something there that triggered that
| belief. They also probably have heard at least the surface
| level version of the oppising argument at some point
| before. Too many debunkers just reiterate the surface
| argument without engaging with whatever is convincing their
| opponent. Then when it doesn't land they complain their
| opponent is brainwashed. Which sometimes might even be
| true, but sometimes their argument just misses the point of
| why their opponent believes what they do.
| pstuart wrote:
| "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not
| reason himself into in the first place."
|
| Fox (and others like it) offer 24/7 propaganda based on
| fear and anger, repeating lies ad nauseam. It's highly
| effective -- I've seen the results first-had.
|
| Making ad hominem attacks against "debunkers" doesn't
| make your case.
|
| And again, trying to change people's minds by telling
| them what they believe is wrong is a fools errand (99.99%
| of the time). But it still needs to happen as that
| misinformation should not go unchallenged.
| meowface wrote:
| This is very, very true. The best debunkers avoid being
| hostile and make the other side feel like they're being
| heard and that their feelings and fears are being
| validated. And they do it in a way that feels honest and
| not condescending and patronizing (like talking to a
| child). They make frequent (sincere) concessions and
| hedges and find as much common ground as they can.
|
| Although he's more populist-left and I'm more
| establishment-liberal (and so I might find him a bit
| overly conciliatory with certain conspiracy theorists),
| Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5/All Gas No Brakes
| demonstrates a good example of this in the first few
| minutes of this video: https://youtu.be/QU6S3Cbpk-k?t=38
| Freedom2 wrote:
| One of the rallying cries of the right is "facts don't care
| about your feelings", but it's interesting how the facts
| either get distorted or ignored.
| netsharc wrote:
| "Charlie Kirk..."
|
| "Waaahhh! How fucking dare you!"
|
| Kimmel made fun of Trump talking about his ballroom when
| being asked about Kirk, and the right got offended and
| mad. Although it's not about feelings, it's more about
| exploiting a tragedy to advance their goals (in this case
| getting a critic like Kimmel off the air).
| meowface wrote:
| On one hand, yes, you're completely right.* On the other
| hand, there is an obligation for something or someone to do
| the job of pointing out the info is wrong, and how and why.
| Even if it makes most of them believe it even more strongly
| afterwards, it's still worse for it to go constantly
| unchallenged and for believers to never even come across
| the opposition.
|
| *(The same is true of left-wing conspiracy theories. It's
| silly to pretend that right-wing conspiracy theorists
| aren't far more common and don't believe in, on average,
| far more delusional and obviously false conspiracy theories
| than left-wingers do, but it's important not to forget they
| exist. I have dealt with some. They're arguably worse in
| some ways since they tend to be more intelligent, and so
| are more able to come up with more plausible
| rationalizations to contort their minds into pretzels.)
| tptacek wrote:
| Wikipedia is probably in the running for one of the greatest
| contributions to public knowledge of the past 100 years, and
| that's a consequence of how it functions, warts and all. I
| don't care how good Grok is or isn't. I'm a fan of frontier
| model LLMs. They don't meaningfully replace Wikipedia.
| meowface wrote:
| I fully agree. Even assuming no forced ideological bias
| from Elon, I doubt it would be nearly as good. I still
| thought it could be an interesting concept, even if I had
| very low hopes from the start.
| physarum_salad wrote:
| "Warts and all" says it all really. What are those warts?
| Who's responsibility are they?
|
| Wikipedia is really not ideal for the LLM age where
| multiple perspectives can be rapidly generated. There are
| many topics where clusters of justified true beliefs and
| reasonable arguments may ALL be valid surrounding a certain
| topic. And no I am not talking about "flat earth" pages or
| other similar nonsense.
| jayd16 wrote:
| It's not controlled by a trusted actor so it doesn't matter
| how it happens to act at the moment.
|
| They could pull the rug at any future time and its almost
| better to gain trust now and cash in that trust later.
| kvirani wrote:
| And the idea of it being controlled by any one entity makes
| it less interesting and less "good" when compared to
| Wikipedia
| meowface wrote:
| My expectations were extremely low, as were, and are, my
| expectations of Grok in general. Was just making an actual
| devil's advocate case.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Was just making an actual devil's advocate case.
|
| Why? We're not nominating a saint or electing a Pope.
|
| If someone has a certain opinion, they're free to argue
| it here. There's no need to invent imaginary opinions and
| pretend to advocate for them when there are so many
| actual HN users.
| meowface wrote:
| We're discussing the central sources of knowledge on the
| internet and by extension pretty much the epistemological
| backbones of present human civilization. It's worth being
| open to other perspectives.
|
| I, a left-leaning person who detests Elon Musk and what
| he's done to Twitter and who generally trusts and likes
| Wikipedia, feel no shame or regret in assessing
| Grokipedia, even if I figured it was just going to be the
| standard tribalistic garbage (which it indeed turned out
| to be).
| lapcat wrote:
| > It's worth being open to other perspectives.
|
| There's a big difference between _listening_ to other
| perspectives and _inventing_ other perspectives.
|
| Why not let the believers of other perspectives argue for
| those perspectives? Wouldn't they be the best advocates?
| And if _nobody_ believes the perspective you 've
| invented, then perhaps it wasn't worth discussing after
| all.
|
| Again, we're not really lacking in volume of commenters
| here.
| meowface wrote:
| Maybe "devil's advocate" was the wrong term for me to
| use. In this thread I am sharing only my honest beliefs
| and perspectives and was referring to the genuine initial
| willingness I had to show charitability to the concept of
| Grokipedia before its release.
| LastTrain wrote:
| " Grok has historically actually been one of the biggest
| debunkers of right-wing misinformation and conspiracy
| theories on Twitter"
|
| Well, no, it hasn't. It has debunked some things. It has made
| some incorrect shit up. But it isn't historically one of the
| "biggest debunkers" of anything. Do we only speak hyperbole
| now?
| meowface wrote:
| I am not using hyperbole or speculating. I absolutely mean
| it.
|
| "Biggest" is tough to quantify, but "most significant" and
| "most effective" is what I meant. I use Twitter way too
| many hours a day basically every day and have a morbid
| fixation on diving deep into right and far-right rabbit
| holes there. (Like, on thousands of occasions.)
|
| Grok is without a doubt the single most important
| contributor to convincing believers of right-wing
| conspiracy theories that maybe the theories aren't as sound
| as they thought. I have seen this play out hundreds of
| times. Grok often serves as a kind of referee or tiebreaker
| in threads between right-wing conspiracy theorists and
| debunkers, and it typically sides overwhelmingly with the
| debunkers. (Or at least used to.) And it does it in a way
| that validates the conspiracy theorist's feelings, so it's
| less likely to trigger a psychological immune system
| response.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/GROKvsMAGA/ contains some
| examples. These may seem cherry-picked, but they generally
| aren't. (Might need to look at some older posts now that
| Elon has put increasingly pressure on the Grok and
| Grokipedia developers to keep it """anti-woke""".)
|
| When a right-wing conspiracy theorist sees some liberal or
| leftist call them out for their falsehoods, they respond
| with insults or otherwise dismiss or ignore it. When daddy
| Elon's Grok tells them - politely - that what they believe
| is complete horseshit, they react differently. They often
| respond to it 3 - 20 times, poking and prodding. Of course,
| most still come away from it convinced Grok is just
| compromised by the wokes/Jews/whatever. But some seem to
| actually eventually accept that, at the least, maybe they
| got some details wrong. It's a very fascinating sight. I
| almost never see that reaction when they argue with human
| interlocutors.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Same reason you posted that comment: it's sometimes interesting
| to discuss a thing even if you dislike the thing.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm fine with the logic of discussing it here but can't
| fathom why Tim Bray thought this would be a useful post given
| his own objectives.
| bebb wrote:
| Because it's a genuinely good idea, and hopefully one for which
| the execution will be improved upon over time.
|
| In theory, using LLMs to summarize knowledge could produce a
| less biased and more comprehensive output than human-written
| encyclopedias.
|
| Whether Grokipedia will meet that challenge remains to be seen.
| But even if it doesn't, there's opportunity for other
| prospective encyclopedia generators to do so.
| falleng0d wrote:
| We may joke about it, but the fact is that it's releasing dumb
| ideas like this that you sometimes get masterpieces. Maybe this
| one is really just one of the bad ones, but eventually Elon will
| have some good ones just like he already has.
|
| And a lot of us would be better off releasing our dumb ideas too.
| The world has a lot of issues and if all you do is talk down and
| don't try to fix anything yourself. Maybe it's time to get off
| the web a little and do something else.
| tokai wrote:
| Not even being snarky, but I can't recall a single good idea he
| had.
| podgietaru wrote:
| He stole a lot of good ideas, does that count?
| pstuart wrote:
| Perhaps I'm working of a false narrative, but SpaceX and the
| methodology it uses (simplify everything and fail fast) seems
| to be coming directly from Elon.
|
| He's a horrible human being but has had a couple worthy
| ideas.
| exe34 wrote:
| I initially believed his early videos about how he applies
| the scientific process, with a spreadsheet of the BOM,
| optimising for specific questions and failing early and all
| that.
|
| Given his later attitude when it came to careful thought,
| I'm no longer under the impression that these earlier
| expositions were his ideas at all. I suspect he got it from
| the engineers and used it to burnish his image. I know that
| certain companies, e.g Apple, Dyson, etc have a culture of
| "all ideas came from the big man at the top, no matter who
| thought of it."
| exe34 wrote:
| he bought them.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I know the world sucks, but "fuck it, let's make it worse" is a
| tough sell for anybody not already onboard. You're better off
| just doing it, rather than trying to convince others to also do
| it.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "Maybe it 's time to get off the web a little and do
| something else."_
|
| One wishes Musk would take this advice: leave the web alone,
| forget for a few months about the social media popularity
| contest that seems to occupy his mind 24/7, and focus on
| rekindling his passion for rockets or roadsters or whatever
| middle-aged pursuit comes next.
| tene80i wrote:
| Which of Elon's dumb ideas are masterpieces?
| podgietaru wrote:
| In this day and age, how any can look at the man who did 2 open
| nazi salutes and think he's still Tony Stark is... delusional
| at best.
| mlmonkey wrote:
| Believe it or not, me (not white, did not grow up in the
| West, had the faintest clue about Nazism) used to do what you
| would consider a "Nazi salute" when I'd see friends and wave
| to them from a distance. I don't know how I picked that up
| but it happened.
|
| I'm not saying that Musk is doing the same; but that one can
| be charitable and say he probably did not mean that. I mean,
| what does he stand to gain from doing so? He's a businessman.
| Take8435 wrote:
| > had the faintest clue about Nazism
|
| Whew lad. This tells me all we need to know. "I don't know
| nothing but folks gotta listen to my opinion!"
| iterateoften wrote:
| At the time he was acting as the one of the largest
| political activists and donors for the Republican party,
| not as a businessman.
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| > I mean, what does he stand to gain from doing so? He's a
| businessman.
|
| I can only guess at his motives, but the salute is not an
| isolated case.
|
| Musk has tweeted "Only AfD can save Germany". The founder
| of AfD, Bjorn Hocke, is a convicted nazi. The German
| domestic intelligence agency, BfV, says AfD is an extreme-
| right organization with anti-democratic ideals ("proven
| far-right extremist entity")
|
| Musk also tweeted "Free Tommy Robinson", a UK far-right
| extremist activist and convicted criminal.
|
| Musk has a history of supporting people and organizations
| that most other businessmen would not.
| judah wrote:
| The ADL, the left-wing Jewish human rights group not aligned
| with Musk in the slightest, called out that Musk's gesture
| was merely an awkward salutation, not a Nazi seig heil[0].
|
| [0]: https://www.jta.org/2025/01/21/politics/how-did-the-adl-
| conc...
| exe34 wrote:
| The left wing Jewish human rights group isn't the arbiter
| of what a nazi salute is. Actual Nazis around the world
| took it as a nod towards their ideology, and he's
| desperately trying to start a civil war in the UK, so I
| would say it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck.
| cupofjoakim wrote:
| Dead Internet Theory is no longer a theory huh?
| mlmonkey wrote:
| > Wikipedia is, to quote myself, the encyclopedia that "anyone
| who's willing to provide citations can edit".
|
| ... except if you try to go against the group think. My edits
| have been reverted and I have been banned simply because I
| decided to speak up about the good things that the Modi
| government in India was doing, of which there are many. I don't
| believe in always harping on the negative, and am generally an
| optimistic person. But I went against the dominant narrative on
| Wikipedia and was rejected with vehemence.
| bawolff wrote:
| People who say these types of things should link their
| wikipedia user account so we could see why they were banned and
| if it really was so unreasonable.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Seeing as their approach to it is "good vs bad" and not "fact
| vs fiction" I think we can draw some conclusions.
| wtfwhateven wrote:
| They never do even when asked. Happy to be proven wrong this
| time of course.
| exe34 wrote:
| Could you share some of the references you tried to use here?
| It might be interesting to see the quality that they refused to
| accept towards overturning their narrative.
| ares623 wrote:
| OP has a chance to be vindicated. Surely they will take it?
| mlmonkey wrote:
| Since you insisted. This is from a couple of years ago, and
| I have moved on to never donating to Wikipedia again, so
| take it FWIW.
|
| I pointed out that India had reduced extreme poverty from
| ~16% in 2013 to ~2% in 2022. This is directly from a World
| Bank report: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/09
| 97221042225345... One would think this would be reliable?
| One would be wrong since this is deemed to be "pro Modi".
| Another was the success of India's mission to bring piped
| water to every household in India (a luxury we take for
| granted in the West). There's a live dashboard maintained
| by the Water Ministry of India:
| https://ejalshakti.gov.in/jjmreport/JJMIndia.aspx
| Apparently it's a biased source. :shrug:
|
| Other examples include the fact that Indian government paid
| for millions of households to construct toilets over the
| last 10 years. Or that millions of houses were constructed
| in villages, fully paid for by the government, during the
| same period. Or that the government also paid for rural
| folks to switch to gas-burning stoves instead of wood-,
| coal- or cowdung- burdning stoves. I'm too lazy to look up
| the references now, but you can find them with easy
| searching.
|
| Surely you can't deny that Wikipedia is biased against the
| so-called "right" side of the political spectrum, and
| biased towards the "left"?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Wikipedia clearly states that its purpose is to catalog
| knowledge/information that has been collected and published
| elsewhere. If you do not provide adequate citations to what are
| considered reputable sources, Wikipedia will reject your work.
|
| It happened to me a number of times before I came to understand
| the Wikipedia model. They are not interested in _your_
| analysis, they are interested in statements that reference
| other inspectable "reputable" analyses.
| UebVar wrote:
| So you where banned for, by your own accord, motivated
| reasoning?
|
| This is the best endorsement for wikipedia possible.
| billy99k wrote:
| I wish this much attention was given to Wikipedia and now,
| Bluesky.
|
| Bias in either direction is bad for society.
| epistasis wrote:
| What's insane is that you think that this attention was not
| given to Wikipedia and Bluesky...
| generationP wrote:
| Wondering if the project will get better from the pushback or
| will just be folded like one of Elon's many ADHD experiments. In
| a sense, encyclopedias _should_ be easy for LLMs: they are meant
| to survey and summarize well-documented material rather than
| contain novel insights; they are often imprecise and muddled
| already (look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree and
| see how many conventions coexist without an explanation of their
| differences; it used to be worse a few years ago); the writing
| style is pretty much that of GPT-5. But the problem type of
| "summarize a biased source and try to remove the bias" isn't
| among the ones I've seen LLMs being tested for, and this is what
| Elon's project lives and dies by.
|
| If I were doing a project like this, I would hire a few dozen
| topical experts to go over the WP articles relevant to their
| fields and comment on their biases rather than waste their time
| rewriting the articles from scratch. The results can then be
| published as a study, and can probably be used to shame the WP
| into cleaning their shit up, without needlessly duplicating the
| 90% of the work that it has been doing well.
| __s wrote:
| > can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit
| up
|
| what if your goal is for wikipedia to be biased in your favor?
| arghandugh wrote:
| It is a disinformation project aimed at morons and morally
| bankrupt monsters, powered and funded by one of history's
| bloodiest mass murderers. Not sure why this takes four pages to
| investigate.
| physarum_salad wrote:
| "Wikipedia, in my mind, has two main purposes: A quick visit to
| find out the basics about some city or person or plant or
| whatever, or a deep-dive to find out what we really know about
| genetic linkages to autism or Bach's relationship with Frederick
| the Great or whatever."
|
| Completely agree with the first purpose but would never use
| wikipedia for the second purpose. Its only good at basics and
| cannot handle complex information well.
| ajross wrote:
| I think that's actually wrong, or hangs on a semantic argument
| about "complexity". Wikipedia is an overview source. It's not
| going to give you "all" the information, but it's absolutely
| going to tell you what information there is. And in particular
| where there's significant argument or controversy, or multiple
| hypotheses, Wikipedia is going to be arguably the best
| source[1] for reflecting the state of discourse.
|
| Like, if there's a subject about which you aren't personally an
| expert, and you have the choice between reading a single review
| paper you found on Google or the Wikipedia page, which are you
| going to choose?
|
| [1] In fact, talk pages are often ground zero!
| physarum_salad wrote:
| The best source is the one that provides the widest breadth
| of information on a topic.
|
| This is a good use of wikipedia: "Like, if there's a subject
| about which you aren't personally an expert, and you have the
| choice between reading a single review paper you found on
| Google or the Wikipedia page, which are you going to choose?"
|
| But that is like skim reading or basic introductions rather
| than in-depth understanding.
| ajross wrote:
| > that is like skim reading or basic introductions
|
| No? How do you learn stuff you don't know? Are you really
| telling me you enroll in a graduate course or buy a
| textbook for everyone one?
|
| Like, can you give an example of a "deep dive" research
| project of yours that does _not_ begin with an
| encyclopedia-style treatment? And then, maybe, check the
| Wikipedia page to see if it 's actually worse than whatever
| you picked?
|
| Again, true domain experts are going to read domain
| journals and consult their peers in the domain for access
| to deep information.[1] But until you get there, you need
| somewhere you can go that you know is a good starting
| point. And arguments that that place is somehow not
| https://wikipedia.org/ seem... well, strained beyond
| credibility.
|
| [1] Though even then domains are really broad these days
| and people tend to use Wikipedia even for their day jobs.
| Lord knows I do.
| jameslk wrote:
| Wikipedia is a great educational resource and one I've donated to
| for over a decade. That said, I like the idea of Grokipedia in
| the sense that it's another potential source I can look at for
| more information and get multiple perspectives. If there's
| anything factual in Grokipedia that Wikipedia is missing,
| Wikipedia can be updated to include it
|
| I hope we can keep growing freely available sources of
| information. Even if some of that information is incorrect or
| flat out manipulative. This isn't anything new. It's what the web
| has always been
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Not sure it still does this but for awhile if you asked Grok a
| question about a sensitive topic and expanded the thinking, it
| said it was searching Elon's twitter history for its ground truth
| perspective.
|
| So instead of a Truth-maximizing AI, it's an Elon-maximizing AI.
| sunaookami wrote:
| This was unintended as observed by Simon here:
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/ and confirmed
| by xAI themselves here:
| https://x.com/xai/status/1945039609840185489
|
| >Another was that if you ask it "What do you think?" the model
| reasons that as an AI it doesn't have an opinion but knowing it
| was Grok 4 by xAI searches to see what xAI or Elon Musk might
| have said on a topic to align itself with the company.
|
| The diff for the mitigation is here: https://github.com/xai-
| org/grok-prompts/commit/e517db8b4b253...
| alyxya wrote:
| At a glance, Grokipedia seems quite promising to me, considering
| how new it is. There are plenty of external citations, so rather
| than relying on a model to recall information internally, it's
| likely effectively just summarizing external references. The fact
| that it's automatically generated at scale means it can be
| iterated on to improve fact checking reliability, exclude certain
| known sources as unreliable, and ensure it has up-to-date and
| valid citation links. We'll have to wait and see how it changes
| over time, but I expect an AI driven online encyclopedia to
| eventually replace the need for a fully human wikipedia.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| > There are plenty of external citations, so rather than
| relying on a model to recall information internally, it's
| likely effectively just summarizing external references.
|
| And according to Tim Bray, it's doing that badly.
|
| > All the references are just URLs and at least some of them
| entirely fail to support the text.
| alyxya wrote:
| It's the first release, so I expect it to get better over
| time. I didn't care for ChatGPT when it was first released
| and thought it wouldn't be trustworthy, but it's much better
| now.
| ef2k wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but reading through LLM generated prose
| becomes a drag very quickly. The em dashes sprinkled everywhere,
| the "it's not this, it's that" style of writing. I even tried
| listening to it and it's still exhausting. Maybe it's the
| ubiquity of it nowadays that is making me jaded, but I tend to
| appreciate terrible writing, like I'm doing in this comment, more
| nowadays.
| ajross wrote:
| I completely agree. There's an "obsequious verbosity" to these
| things, like they're trying to convince you they they're not
| bullshitting. But that seems like a tuning issue (you can
| obviously get an LLM to emit prose in any style you want), and
| my guess is that this result has been extensively A/B tested to
| be more comforting or something.
|
| One of the skills of working with the form, which I'm still
| developing, is the ability to frame follow-on questions in a
| specific enough way to prevent the BS engine from engaging.
| Sometimes I find myself asking it questions using jargon I 100%
| know is wrong just because the answer will tell me what the
| phrasing it wants to hear is.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| I checked a topic I care about, and that I have personally
| researched because the publicly available information is pretty
| bad.
|
| The article is even worse than the one on Wikipedia. It follows
| the same structure but fails to tell a coherent story. It
| references random people on Reddit (!) that don't even support
| the point it's trying to make. Not that the information on Reddit
| is particularly good to begin with, even it it were properly
| interpreted. It cites Forbes articles parroting pretty insane and
| unsubstantiated claims, I thought mainstream media was not to be
| trusted?
|
| In the end it's longer, written in a weird style, and doesn't
| really bring any value. Asking Grok about about the same topic
| and instructing it to be succinct yields much better results.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| What's the article?
| jameslk wrote:
| It was just launched? I remember when Wikipedia was pretty
| useless early on. The concept of using an LLM to take a ton of
| information and distill it down into encyclopedia form seems
| promising with iteration and refinement. If they add in an
| editor step to clean things up, that would likely help a lot
| (not sure if maybe they already do this)
| josefritzishere wrote:
| I looked at Grokopedia today and spot-checked for references to
| my own publications which exist in Wikipedia. As is often
| reported, it very directly plagerizes Wikipedia. But it did
| remove dead links. This is pretty underwhelming even on the Musk
| hype scale.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Grokipedia is motivated significantly by the idea that Wikipedia
| is seriously flawed in its handling of topics (eg socio-cultural
| and historical) that have very different analyses from left and
| right, with a major bias to the left.
|
| The author here sees no such issue, which is the majority
| viewpoint on HN I would say, given the instant down-votes for
| those who challenge the idea of an eventual impartiality built-
| in.
|
| Regardless of which side you fall on, I think this means that the
| analysis here (while I agree with most of it) needs to be treated
| with caution on that foundational issue of how Grokipedia
| approaches such topics in comparison with Wikipedia.
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