11 ms·
Tim Bray on Grokipedia
- cupofjoakim 11mo agoDead Internet Theory is no longer a theory huh?
- tptacek 11mo agoWhy give it oxygen?
- mensetmanusman 11mo agoIt'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 11mo ago"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 11mo agoCrucial to distinguish between knowledge, fact, claim and allegation. Compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk#Assassination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk#Assassination https://grokipedia.com/page/Charlie_Kirk 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 11mo ago> 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 11mo agoTo 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 11mo agoThe 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.
- tshaddox 11mo agoSame reason you posted that comment: it's sometimes interesting to discuss a thing even if you dislike the thing.
- tptacek 11mo agoI'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.
- tim333 11mo agoI doubt a post saying it was so boring he was unable to finish reading the page about himself is going to bring in many readers. That's kind of been my impression too. Not that it's terribly biased or anything but just rather boring to read.
- keeda 11mo agoI don't know if this is why, but: he's in a unique position of having an article on himself on Grokipedia, and thus being able and willing to compare it with the reality as he remembers it. That's in contrast to other topics, the nuances of which even seasoned experts could disagree about. Any discussion on that could devolve into the nuances of the topic rather than Grokipedia itself. But it's fair to assume the topmost expert on Tim Bray is Tim Bray, so we should be getting a pretty unbiased review. As such it could be a useful insight into how Grok and Grokipedia and its owners operate.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- TheBlight 11mo ago[flagged]
- LastTrain 11mo agoProof? More than a couple anecdotes please.
- TheBlight 11mo agoAlthough I'm sure it's been a blast, we don't need to play by your rules any more.
- LastTrain 11mo agoOK
- pureagave 11mo agoHow many more than a couple do you need? 20 anecdotes? 40 anecdotes? 100? How much bias is okay for you and the world?
- LastTrain 11mo agoI dunno. Give us at least some? Start with just one really mind blowing one. The implication is there is a big cabal imposing Wikipedia on the world. Given that, it should be easy enough to throw out some concrete examples of major impact.
- onetimeusename 11mo agoThe ADL was caught in a campaign making edits. I remember more details in the past but I simply can't find them now with any search engine. https://forward.com/news/467423/adl-may-have-violated-wikipedia-rules-editing-its-own-entries/ https://forward.com/news/467423/adl-may-have-violated-wikipe... But also the ADL is accusing others of covert campaigns: https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3330 https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?... So I am sure this is a thing among corporations/NGOs. Note that I picked the ADL because I happened to know this and not because I am trying to make a point about the ADL's purpose. Also I am not really answering the part about progressives although the ADL is arguably a progressive NGO. I think there are astroturfing campaigns on Wikipedia whether progressive or not.
- bebb 11mo agoBecause 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.
- quantified 11mo agoSummarizing all the knowledge is very very far from summarizing all that is written. All it takes is including everything published. The earth must be flat. Disease is caused by bad morals. Etc etc.
- epistasis 11mo agoI don't why an LLM would be better in theory. The Wikipedia process is created to manage bias. LLMs are created to repeat the input data, and will therefore be quite biased towards the training data. Humans looking through sources, applying knowledge of print articles and real world experiences to sift through the data, that seems far more valuable.
- smitty1e 11mo ago> The Wikipedia process is created to manage bias. LLMs are created to repeat the input data, and will therefore be quite biased towards the training data. The perception of bias in Wikipedia remains, and if LLMs can detect and correct for bias, then Grokipedia seems at least a theoretical win. I'm happy with at least a set of links for further research on a topic of interest.
- apical_dendrite 11mo agoIs there some objective standard for what is biased? For many people (including Elon Musk) biased just means something that they disagree with. When grok says something factual that Elon doesn't like, he puts his thumb on the scale and changes how grok responds (see the whole South African white 'genocide' business). So why should we trust that an LLM will objectively detect bias, when the people in charge of training that LLM prefer that it regurgitate their preferred story, rather than what is objectively true?
- falleng0d 11mo agoWe 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 11mo agoNot even being snarky, but I can't recall a single good idea he had.
- podgietaru 11mo agoHe stole a lot of good ideas, does that count?
- pstuart 11mo agoPerhaps 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 11mo agoI 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 11mo agohe bought them.
- dreamcompiler 11mo ago[flagged]
- universconstant 11mo ago[flagged]
- universconstant 11mo ago[flagged]
- pessimizer 11mo ago[flagged]
- bebb 11mo agoWikipedia isn't even the only one online. The Encyclopaedia Britannica still exists.
- mlmonkey 11mo ago[flagged]
- UebVar 11mo agoSo you where banned for, by your own accord, motivated reasoning? This is the best endorsement for wikipedia possible.
- bawolff 11mo agoPeople 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 11mo agoSeeing as their approach to it is "good vs bad" and not "fact vs fiction" I think we can draw some conclusions.
- wtfwhateven 11mo agoThey never do even when asked. Happy to be proven wrong this time of course.
- tstrimple 11mo ago> Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views > Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes? > Con: LOL no...no not those views > Me: So....deregulation? > Con: Haha no not those views either > Me: Which views, exactly? > Con: Oh, you know the ones Unfortunately always relevant.
- exe34 11mo agoCould 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.
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- billy99k 11mo ago[flagged]
- epistasis 11mo agoWhat's insane is that you think that this attention was not given to Wikipedia and Bluesky...
- generationP 11mo agoWondering 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 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 11mo ago> 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?
- 9dev 11mo agoNo no no, you see, you got it all wrong. If the Wikipedia article on, let’s say, transsexualism, says that’s an orientation, not a disease—then that’s leftist bias. Removing that bias means correcting it to say it’s a mental illness, obviously. That makes the article unbiased, pure truth.
- arghandugh 11mo agoIt 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 11mo ago"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 11mo agoI 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 11mo agoThe 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 11mo ago> 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/ 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 11mo agoWikipedia 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 11mo agoNot 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 11mo agoThis was unintended as observed by Simon here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/ and confirmed by xAI themselves here: https://x.com/xai/status/1945039609840185489 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/e517db8b4b2539ea825bc4038917740e35bcaeba https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/e517db8b4b253...
- epistasis 11mo agoThere's a chance it was unintended, but no proof of that.
- simonw 11mo agoThat's effectively impossible to prove, especially if you don't believe statements made by the only organization that has access to the underlying evidence. I actually think that it's funnier if it was an emergent behavior as opposed to a deliberate decision. And it fits my mental model of how weird LLMs are, so I think unintentional really is the more likely explanation.
- siliconc0w 11mo agoThe problem is it's part of a pattern of several 'bugs' and even 'unauthorized prompt changes' that have caused Grok to be more Elon-aligned. And when asked by right wing people about an embarrassing Grok response that refutes their view, Elon has agreed it's a problem and said he is "working on it".
- alyxya 11mo agoAt 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 11mo ago> 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 11mo agoIt’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.
- nickthegreek 11mo agoWhy release an untrustworthy encyclopedia at all? It doesn’t appear to be better than the existing options in any way and worse in many.
- ef2k 11mo agoMaybe 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 11mo agoI 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.
- tim333 11mo agoI find the Grokipedia writing especially a drag. I don't think it's em dashes and similar so much as the ideas not being clear. In good writing the writer normally has a clear idea in mind and is communicating it but the Grokipedia writing is kind of a waffley mess. I guess maybe because LLMs don't have much of an idea in mind so much as stringing words together.
- madeofpalk 11mo agoIt’s right there in the seconds paragraph of the article: > My Grokipedia entry has over seven thousand words, compared to a mere 1,300 in my Wikipedia article
- andrewflnr 11mo ago> I tend to appreciate terrible writing, like I'm doing in this comment, more nowadays. Nah dude, what you're describing from LLMs is terrible writing. Just because it has good grammar and punctuation doesn't make it good, for exactly the reasons you listed. Good writing pulls you through.
- hocuspocus 11mo agoI 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 11mo agoWhat’s the article?
- jameslk 11mo agoIt 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)
- 9dev 11mo agoNothing about that seems promising! The one single thing you want from an Encyclopedia is compressing factual information into high-density overviews. You need to be able to trust the article to be faithful to its sources. Wikipedia mods are super anal about that, and for good reason! Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? You can never trust it to be faithful with the sources. On Wikipedia, at least there’s lots of people checking on each other. There are no such guardrails for an LLM. You would need to trust a single publisher with a technology that’s allowing them to crank out millions of entries and updates permanently, so fast that you could never detect subtle changes or errors or biases targeted in a specific way—and that doesn’t even account for most people, who never even bother to question an article, let alone check the sources. If there ever was a tool suited just perfectly for mass manipulation, it’s an LLM-written collection of all human knowledge, controlled by a clever, cynical, and misanthropic asshole with a god complex.
- josefritzishere 11mo agoI 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 11mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- smitty1e 11mo agoGrokipedia might have a better present-tense understanding as it hoovers up data. One great feature of Wikipedia is being able to download it and query a local shapshot. As a technical matter, Grokipedia could do something like that, eventually. Does not appear to support snapshots at the 0.1 version.
- lschueller 11mo agoGrokipedia is a joke. Lot of articles I've checked are AI slop at its worst and at the bottom it says "The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License."
- morkalork 11mo agoSo, how often does it awkwardly bring up white genocide in South Africa in unrelated contexts?
- jgalt212 11mo ago> Woke/Anti-Woke · The whole point, one gathers, is to provide an antidote to Wikipedia’s alleged woke bias According to the Manhattan Institute as cited by the Economist, even grok has a leftwards bias (roughly even to all the other big models). https://www.economist.com/international/2025/08/28/donald-trump-is-waging-war-on-woke-ai https://www.economist.com/international/2025/08/28/donald-tr...
- dragonwriter 11mo ago> According to the Manhattan Institute as cited by the Economist, even grok has a leftwards bias (roughly even to all the other big models). When you are far enough to the right, everything has a left bias, and even the degrees become hard to distinguish.
- dr_kretyn 11mo agoInteresting that only now I'm learning about Grokipedia. Never heard of it until someone said it's bad so my natural instinct is to check it out. Guess that's plus one for "it doesn't matter what they say as long as they say."
- madeofpalk 11mo agoI mean it only came out this week. So you heard about it immediately on launch.
- davidguetta 11mo agoGrokipedia is VERY rough to read at the moment, and has a clear pro-capitalist / 'classical right wing' bias (reading the economic pages). However it's still 0.1, we'll see what the v1 will look like.
- StephenHerlihyy 11mo agoI don’t really know who Tim Bray is and until now I had never been to Grokipedia. I don’t really like Grok - I tried Superheavy and it was slow, bloated and no better than Claude Opus. But I have a bad habit of fact checking. It’s the engineer in me. You tell me something, I instinctively verify. In the linked article, sub-section, ‘References’, Mr. Bray opines about a reference not directly relating to the content cited. So I went to Grokipedia for the first time ever and checked. Mr. Bray’s quote of a quote he quote couldn’t find is misleading. The sentence on Grokipedia includes 2 referencee of which he includes only the first. This first reference relates to his work with the FTC. The second part of the sentence relates to the second reference. Specifically on Grokipedia in the Tim Bray article linked reference number 50, paragraph 756 cleanly addresses the issue raised by Mr. Bray. After that I stopped reading, still don’t know or care who Tim Bray is and don’t plan on using either Grokipedia or Grok in the near future. Perhaps Mr. Bray’s did not fully explore the references or perhaps there was malice. I don’t know. Horseshoe theory applies. Pure pro- positions and pure anti- positions are idiotic and should be filtered accordingly. Filter thusly applied.
- cowpig 11mo agoIf you're going to go through the trouble of checking, you might as well link to the things you checked.
- StephenHerlihyy 11mo agoSure. Tim Bray’s Grokipedia: https://grokipedia.com/page/Tim_Bray https://grokipedia.com/page/Tim_Bray Relevant text: Serving as the FTC's infrastructure expert, he testified on technical aspects such as service speed and user perceptions of responsiveness, assessing potential competitive harms from reduced incentives for innovation post-acquisition; his declaration, referenced in court filings, emphasized empirical metrics over speculative harms.[49][50] [49] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/FTCReplytoMetaResponse-CounterstatementofMaterialFacts.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/FTCReplytoMetaR... [50] https://dpo-india.com/Resources/USA_Court_Judgements_Against_privacy_Violations/USA-District-Court-of-Columbia-FEDERAL-TRADE-COMMISSION-vs-META-PLATFORMS%2CINC.pdf https://dpo-india.com/Resources/USA_Court_Judgements_Against... Paragraph 756: Tim Bray, the FTC’s proffered infrastructure expert, opined that “[u]sers’ perceptions of how quickly an online product responds to requests is an important component of the quality of their experience,” and that the delay between a user request and an online product’s response is commonly referred to as latency. Ex. 288 at ¶ 98 (Bray Rep.). Mr. Krieger testified that Instagram saw a “significant latency reduction post-Instagration,” a term referring to Instagram’s migration to Meta’s data servers. Ex. 153 at 76:24-77:5, 287:3-20 (Krieger Dep. Tr.). He prepared a presentation in 2014 stating that there was a “75% latency reduction in our core ‘hot path’ in rendering feeds” after the integration.
- jandrese 11mo agoGrokipedia seems to serve no purpose to me. It's AI slop fossilized. Like if I wanted the AI opinion on something I would just ask the AI. Having it go through and generate static webpages for every topic under the sun seems pointless.
- espeed 11mo agoGrokipedia vs. Wikipedia Jesus Entry https://espeed.dev/Grokipedia-vs.-Wikipedia-Jesus-Entry https://espeed.dev/Grokipedia-vs.-Wikipedia-Jesus-Entry I also asked ChatGPT and Claude: https://chatgpt.com/share/6902ef7b-96fc-800c-ab26-9f2a0304afa3 https://chatgpt.com/share/6902ef7b-96fc-800c-ab26-9f2a0304af... https://claude.ai/share/3fb2aa34-316c-431e-ab64-0738dd84873e https://claude.ai/share/3fb2aa34-316c-431e-ab64-0738dd84873e
- ValveFan6969 11mo agoOn the other hand, I click on a Wikipedia article and I'm immediately bombarded with "[blank] is an alt-right neo-nazi fascist authoritarian homophobic transphobic bigoted conspiracy theory (Source: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HATE THIS TOPIC I BEG YOU)" At least Grokipedia tries to look like it was written with the intent to inform, not spoonfeed an opinion.
- whatthesmack 11mo ago> At least Grokipedia tries to look like it was written with the intent to inform, not spoonfeed an opinion. In addition, Grokipedia isn't encumbered by a Perennial Sources List[0] whose "generally reliable" section consists entirely of center and/or center-left media sources, and seems to be entirely purposed for gatekeeping. The web site of the US television news network with by far the most viewership (Fox) was moved from "generally reliable" to "marginally reliable" for scientific and political claims, while MSNBC and CNN remain "generally reliable". This fact is laughable, considering MSNBC and CNN's mutual refusal to report on things like the Arctic Frost[1] (currently) and Hunter Biden laptop[2] (historically) conspiracies initiated under the Biden administration. Fox reported on both, but is not allowed as a source despite being the only major news network to not suppress the stories. When an "encyclopedia" only allows unrestricted use of sources that fail to report information on notable news (such as conspiracies that are more far-reaching than Watergate), the encyclopedia will become less used by people because they no longer trust its new organizational and editorial biases. Some folks, including myself, rarely reference Wikipedia anymore, because it often doesn't have the information being researched, and even if it does, we can't be sure we're getting very much (or any!) of the full story. This is broadly demonstrated by Wikipedia's constant decline in traffic from 2022 (~165M visits/day) through the present (~128M visits/day)[3]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_sources_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_sources_list [1] https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/new-jack-smith-subpoenaed-records-for-over-400-republican-targets-as-part-of-arctic-frost https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/new-jack-... [2] https://grokipedia.com/page/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy https://grokipedia.com/page/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy [3] https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-exploring-trends-in-wikipedia-traffic https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-exploring-tren...
- uvaursi 11mo agoThese hot takes are somewhat useless honestly. People give these point-in-time opinions ignoring that the rate of improvement is exponential when it comes to software. The last three, four years of heavy AI utilization have been refreshing. I personally treat these things the same way I treat car accidents: if an autonomous system still has accidents but has less than human drivers do, it’s a success. Given the amount of nonsense and factually incorrect things people spout, I’d still call Grok even at this early stage a major success. Also I’m a big fan of how it ties nuanced details to better present a comprehensive story. I read both TBray’s Wiki and Groki entries. The Groki version has some solid info that I suppose I should expect of an AI that can pull a larger corpus of data in. A human editor would of course omit that, or change it, and then Wiki admins would have to lock the page as changes erupt into a silly flame war over what’s factually accurate. Because we can’t seem to agree. Anyway - good stuff! Looking forward to more of Grok. Very fitting name, actually.