6 ms·
Especially relevant today with the release of grokipedia
by babblingfish 11mo ago
Especially relevant today with the release of grokipedia
- brightball 11mo agoIt’s so good. I spent 2 hours reading articles on there last night and the consistency was excellent, although a little verbose at times.
- GaryBluto 11mo agoIf it works, it works.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoUnsupervised Source of Truth(tm), what could possibly go wrong?
- sunaookami 11mo agoJust like Wikipedia?
- neaden 11mo agoWith Wikipedia there is the talk page which will alert you to controversies about topics, as well as checking the citations. While Grokopedia has "citations" when I checked many of them didn't actually have anything to do with what they were supposed to be citing.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoWikipedia has 7 billion potential editors. Grokapedia explicitly says we can't edit it. So, absolutely the opposite thing.
- GaryBluto 11mo agoI don't understand what supervision you want. Worried about inaccuracies? Double check and use it in conjunction with other sources.
- neaden 11mo agoYeah, but it doesn't work. It's full of inaccuracies.
- djeastm 11mo agoNevermind the Grok-ness of it, I can't seriously believe a thinking human being would spend 2 hours knowingly reading something written by AI.
- brightball 11mo agoI decided to read through a subject I already knew a lot about.
- delichon 11mo agoI'm unsurprised that a human being would glibly dismiss the utility of the most powerful new form of knowledge representation since the written word, since we are all deeply in the grip of motivated reasoning.
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago> the most powerful new form of knowledge representation since the written word 1. the LLM model is a representation of language, not knowledge. The two may be highly correlated, but they are probably not coterminant and they are certainly not equivalent. 2. the final "product" is still the written word 3. whether LLM's are or are not the most powerful new form of knowledge representation or not, their output is so consistently inconsistent in its accuracy that it makes that power difficult to utilize, at best.
- djeastm 11mo agoNo one is being glib here, this is a serious concern. Think about it, please. A human being choosing to spend hours of their time reading something produced by something that is an amorphous, unanswerable, unaccountable agglomeration of weights formed not by a human's lived experience, but by a for-profit company's selection of inputs and tuning. It's completely dystopian.
- add-sub-mul-div 11mo agoIt's for the intersection of people who want LLM summarization and people who want an assurance of confirmation of bias explicitly built in. It's not for thinking people.
- radley 11mo agoOf course, it cribbed the best!
- coolelectronics 11mo agoIt took me less than a minute on the site to run into factually wrong information, broken citations, etc. Cannot imagine rotting my brain with knowingly bad information for over 2 hours
- antonymoose 11mo agoI’ve run into the exact same set of issues on Wikipedia.
- gdulli 11mo agoSuggesting that people being able to make mistakes means that there's no qualitative and quantitative difference in how AI makes mistakes is either disingenuous or stupid. I don't know which place you're coming from or what kind of gotcha you think you pulled, but it doesn't create a strong argument either way.
- gamerdonkey 11mo agoDid you fix them?
- hagbard_c 11mo agoThis is sometimes hard when the editors keep on reversing edits which attempt to fix those errors. It will be interesting to see how Grokipedia - a bad name, surely they can come up with something better - deals with this. I often come across out-of-place or clearly ideologically driven content on Wikipedia and normally just leave this alone - I have better things to do with my limited time than to fight edit wars with activist editors. Having said that I did a number of experiments some 5 years ago with editing Wikipedia where I removed clearly ideologically driven sections out of articles where those sections really had no place. One of these experiments consisted of removing sections about ´queer politics and queer viewpoints' from articles about popular cartoon characters. These sections - often spanning several paragraphs - were inserted relatively recently into the articles and were nothing more than attempts to use those articles to push a 'queer' viewpoint on the subject matter and as such not relevant for a general purpose encyclopedia. I commented my edits with a reference to the NPOV rules. My edits were reversed without comment. I reversed the reversion with the remark to either explain the reversion of leave the edits in place and was reversed again, no comments. I reversed again with an invitation to discuss the edits on the Talk pages which was not accepted while my edits were reversed again. This continued for a while with different editors reversing my edits and accusations of vandalism. Looking through the 'contribs' section for the users responsible for adding the irrelevant content showed they were doing this to hundreds of articles. I just checked and noticed the same individuals are still actively adding their 'queer perspectives' to articles where such perspectives are not relevant for a general-purpose encyclopedia.
- nojonestownpls 11mo agoI checked it out based on this comment. It's funny how in some ways it feels like a lazy student-assignment copied from Wikipedia: the subheadings and the structure are exactly the same as the Wikipedia article on the topic, and sometimes it even leaves in the citation numbers as normal text like a careless copy paste. However, it also seemed less eurocentric, mentioning non-Greek non-Roman side of origins of fields where relevant, when the corresponding Wikipedia article doesn't. Wikipedia is generally pretty bad at this, but I had expected "Grokipedia" to be worse, not better in this regard!
- ZeroGravitas 11mo agoIf I was rewriting Wikipedia pages with an LLM I'd maybe use all the different languages' Wikipedias as input.
- mapontosevenths 11mo agooh...no. I thought this was a joke, but I googled it and it's not.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago> The articles in Grokipedia indicate that they have undergone fact-checking by the Grok model.[3] Visitors to Grokipedia cannot make edits, though they can suggest edits via a pop-up form for reporting wrong information.[5] Musk positioned Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia that would "purge out the propaganda" in the latter.[1] Articles have been described as manipulated to promote right-wing perspectives and Elon Musk's views,[4][7] medical misinformation,[7] and for removing content disfavored by Musk.[8][9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia Seems like a great platform, here's to hoping it costs a lot to run and doesn't influence too many humans to drink bleach.
- dreamcompiler 11mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 11mo agoThat references another article "Views of Elon Musk" ... Quite an unusual format, "views of [public figure]". I don't remember seeing anything quite like it on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk
- embedding-shape 11mo agoSeems there are a couple of pages like that, if you enter "views of" without hitting enter in the Wikipedia search bar, you get some suggestions. Seems there is similar pages for Kanye West, Richard Dawkins and some more. Many of the pages are redirects back to the main page of the person though, so seems they're maybe disappearing or exclusively used for people who are very outspoken about lots of different things.
- exasperaited 11mo agoThey are largely used to put the Talk: flamewar in a box, I think, so they can separate out the mundane fact edits from the rest.
- embedding-shape 11mo agoThat's actually kind of neat, at least for us that don't care much of the political views of celebrities.
- exasperaited 11mo agoI think it makes sense for some politicians, too —- especially politicians who have an extensive life story otherwise. Not least because it bumps the topic up one heading level, as it were, which means more possible uses of mediawiki formatting to break it up than if it were a section of another page.
- jalapenos 11mo agoSomeone please enlighten me: what is the point of an AI-generated Wikipedia when we're all now using (Wikipedia-trained) AIs directly instead of Wikipedias?
- Yizahi 11mo agoIt reduces a barrier to entry, so less knowledgeable people can access the same information without inputting a prompt and then corrections. Also a person using an LLM directly may accidentally produce a progressive/liberal result, which is not good. So while for now it seems Elonopedia is mostly automated, in the future I foresee that young energetic party members will vet the most popular articles, to follow the party line.
- breppp 11mo agoGenerally the UX could be an advantage, the hypertext format of wikipedia and length is nicer when you want to go on a random knowledge walk compared to LLMs. Regarding the Wikipedia trained Ouroboros models, you can argue that the Wikipedia training is mostly there to learn to summarize sources and translate, and once you have the original sources the LLM might do a better job than humans
- miltonlost 11mo agoFrom the wikipedia on grokipedia: "Following the public launch of Grokipedia, it was criticised for publishing false information. Wired reported that "The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people." So, it's a way of Musk using AI to propagandize on a large scale.
- reaperducer 11mo agosocial media may be fueling a rise in transgender people So one part of the Musk empire is fueling a thing that another part of the Musk empire doesn't like. Seems like the problem is in one hand, and the solution is in the other.
- z7 11mo agoHere's the Grokipedia submission (currently censored / flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459
- tim333 11mo agoIt seems a bit unfairly flagged. After all the first AI written encyclopedia seems a new and interesting thing.
- georgefrowny 11mo agoI would really, really like to see the prompts used for this next to each article. Since "The Algorithm" at Twitter was supposed to be open sourced, surely that wouldn't be controversial. And I genuinely do find it absolutely fascinating and somewhat shocking how LLMs can follow such long and complex prompts and respond so well.
- mapontosevenths 11mo ago[flagged]
- georgefrowny 11mo agoIt would be genuinely interesting to know if it was that generic or if it had special sauce for certain subjects. For example, Ask Grok allegedly uses this system prompt: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/blob/main/ask_grok_system_prompt.j2 https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/blob/main/ask_grok_s... Which does seem very neutral. So then then question is have they encoded bias at a much deeper level directly in the training data or what? A contrarian might say that maybe is really is unbiased and we're so used to the Woke Left that reality sounds right-wing. To which I'd say it seems unlikely that Goering gets an "Economic Achievements" section, Goebbels gets "Intellectual Contributions" and none of Greta Thunberg, Nelson Mandela nor Martin Luther King have any positive-sounding top level section. I also do not think that the oddly semantically empty sign off from Reinhard Heydrich is a fair extract of the article that it cites as a source: > Ultimately, while atrocities are verifiably tied to his commands, the net efficiency in quelling domestic threats arguably prolonged Nazi governance, a trade-off debated in terms of causal realism versus moral absolutism.[20](https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-heydrich.htm https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-heydrich....)
- mapontosevenths 11mo ago> moral absolutism I have a personal rule that whenever someone starts to whinge about moral relativism when talking about Nazi's it's pretty safe to just assume they're either Nazi's or Nazi-adjacent. I think it's fair to include AI's in that rule.