5 ms·

It’s not the fact that it exists nor is written by AIs, it’s the intent that it should promote Musk’s personal (political) biases instead of seeking out the tru

It’s not the fact that it exists nor is written by AIs, it’s the intent that it should promote Musk’s personal (political) biases instead of seeking out the truth.

refurb 11mo ago
How so? Musk isn’t writing the articles, Grok is. And as far as I’ve seen, Grok doesn’t spit out information all that different from the other LLMs.
- LexiMax 11mo ago
  > Musk isn’t writing the articles, Grok is. The AI is necessarily biased based on what it's trained on, and the prompt it uses. Most of the time, there is a plausible deniability at play, which is what tech oligarchs rely upon to shape your world. Thankfully in the case of Grok, we know for a material fact that it uses a biased prompt because Twitter users have tricked it into being repeated publicly.
  - refurb 11mo ago
    I have not heard of the biased prompt and since prompts are constantly refined, how do you know it's still in use? But I found this analysis interest... https://www.promptfoo.dev/blog/grok-4-political-bias/ https://www.promptfoo.dev/blog/grok-4-political-bias/ *Our measurements show that: Grok is more right leaning than most other AIs, but it's still left of center. GPT 4.1 is the most left-leaning AI, both in its responses and in its judgement of others. Surprisingly, Grok is harsher on Musk's own companies than any other AI we tested. Grok is the most contrarian and the most likely to adopt maximalist positions - it tends to disagree when other AIs agree All popular AIs are left of center with Claude Opus 4 and Grok being closest to neutral.*
    - tavavex 11mo ago
      > since prompts are constantly refined, how do you know it's still in use? That's an unusual amount of leniency. If someone was tuning their system in such a way, why would you give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe now they've resolved all of the issues and will never do it again? It's like buying a tabloid every week because "what if they changed their ways and now it will all be truthful?" The analysis you quoted doesn't really mean anything. I'm not sure how universally useful data can be extracted from having the models test themselves. But more importantly, all the models that were tested were made in the US, and it's extremely likely that from the selected data and the English-first approach, they would all skew towards an American perception of any issue. People from different corners of the world would identify the "center" as holding very different views from what you likely think. Also, being on the "center" isn't valuable unless you believe that being in the center is a merit in and of itself. If the best answer to an objective problem was a policy that's thought of as partisan, I would want a model to give me that correct partisan answer, instead of trying to both-sides everything or act like a contrarian whenever possible.
      - refurb 11mo ago
        Assuming something is happening because of past actions is fine, it just isn’t proof. And I’m not sure what your criticisms of the test are. The models didn’t test themselves, they were tested based on their responses. And yes, it’s US based because that the intent - to see if there was a political bias based on the US political spectrum. And the “center” is the most desirable output. Responses have to land somewhere on the political spectrum. Center means a balance between right and left wing.
    - smallmancontrov 11mo ago
      Why does political center correspond to truth? Can you not think of a dozen examples of "both sides wrong"? Of "both sides right," where a vicious fight erupts over inconsequential details? The right wing of US politics has a better organized and funded propaganda arm (show me the left-wing equivalent of Roger Ailes and now Elon Musk) so we should expect truth-seeking to land us "left of center."
      - refurb 11mo ago
        > Why does political center correspond to truth? Because it's not biased to the left or right wing? They were testing the models political opinions. Ideally, models would be biased to neither left or right wing views.
    - relaxing 11mo ago
      That study is hilarious. I can only assume the anuthors are being deliberately obtuse about “shared training data”. The policies listed have widespread public support, so it would seem quite unremarkable that the training data would reflect that stance. > Despite their differences, we found numerous questions where all four models agreed within narrow margins. Remarkably, the vast majority of these agreements lean left: > Universal Progressive Stances: > Support for wealth taxes on fortunes over $50 million > Agreement on raising minimum wage > Support for stronger labor protections > Criticism of corporate monopoly power > Universal Conservative Stances (rare): > Individual gun rights under the Second Amendment > Some free market principles > This suggests shared training data or safety measures pushing all models toward progressive economic positions.
      - benmmurphy 11mo ago
        agreement on raising the minimum wage is suspect because its a controversial econ position and presumably some form of UBI or 'negative income tax' is a much better alternative which would have the redistributive effects of a higher minimum wage without the 'tariff' downsides. like we have recently heard why its a very bad idea to artificially raise prices but apparently we are unable to extend this analysis to the minimum wage.
    - LexiMax 11mo ago
      > I have not heard of the biased prompt and since prompts are constantly refined, how do you know it's still in use? The old adage of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." We know for a fact that Grok has used biased internal prompts, the burden of proof is now on people who want to claim otherwise.
- UncleMeat 11mo ago
  Do other LLMs say that Musk is a better athlete than Lebron James and is more deserving of a lifetime achievement award at the Adult Video Network awards than Riley Reid?
binary132 11mo ago
unlike the eminently objective and unbiased Wikipedia
- LexiMax 11mo ago
  Conservapedia already exists if you care about the politics involved. Grokipedia is just a lazy low-effort vanity project of an unlikable billionaire. And that's a sentiment I've seen from conservatives and liberals. EDIT: I think it's worth mentioning that tech oligarchs once pretended to be progressive because it was the "in" thing to do. They are now pretending to be conservative because it's the "in" thing to do. But the truth is that they have no real morals and only believe in their own wealth and power. Even if you think their politics align with yours, it is only a temporary convenience, they will discard you as sure as they discarded liberals.
  - binary132 11mo ago
    You’re reading in a lot that I did not say. Wikipedia is not “truth-seeking”, which GP claimed, that’s all.
mbirth 11mo ago
Do you have any evidence that Grokipedia is actually biased? Most articles are merely their Wikipedia counterpart filtered through the Grok LLM.
- fragmede 11mo ago
  The bit with mechahitler wasn't enough to convince you that the operators of the system are intentionally guiding it in a certain direction?
- rtkwe 11mo ago
  Musks own tweets and words should be more than enough: Wokipedia: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972991279706636437 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972991279706636437 Cleaning up a "mountain of woke bullshit" models are trained on: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972991279706636437 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972991279706636437 He hasn't been subtle in the goal of this rewriting of wikipedia.
  - atonse 11mo ago
    I think the parent was asking you for evidence of articles with bias, though. Not evidence of Musk making fun of Wikipedia. I’m also curious to see any egregious violations where grok also dug its heels in a biased way when presented with an edit/correction with credible evidence. I’d love to see some evidence of it. (Not in a sarcastic way, I’m genuinely asking)
    - croon 11mo ago
      Its' entire (stated) raison d'etre is that wikipedia is biased and wrong, so let's swap the question and instead ask for evidence of wikipedia sticking to wrong edits. If not, then grokipedia must exist for some other reason. Edit: Of course edit spamming/concerted efforts can affect wikipedia, but I'd rather that possibility than the entire thing be edit controlled by a person with an endless string of scrupulous behaviour.
      - 11mo ago
qcnguy 11mo ago
The explicit stated goal of Grok is to seek out the truth. A lot of the internet doesn't do this. Wikipedia doesn't! As far as Wikipedia is concerned, if something is said by "authoritative sources" then it goes in, and something isn't then it doesn't, and what is actually true doesn't matter at all. They explicitly ban original research, even. But what gets blessed as authoritative, some backroom deals that always accept left wing sources and never right wing, even when the left wing sources have a long and objective history of fake news and other unreliability. It's just a bunch of MSNBC viewer memes about what's reliable, they don't have any objective system to determine it. Grokipedia's approach has the potential to be superior. It has a much more direct goal of truth seeking that bypasses the whole question of what authoritative means. Grok will do original research to establish what's true. And it can be systematically improved by tuning and prompting it to be better, whereas it often seems that Wikipedia's top contributors are top contributors because they relish the ability to be bad.
- card_zero 11mo ago
  Not "authoritative", reliable. From WP:Reliable_sources "Articles should be based on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy." You can see summaries of past debates about specific sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per... If Grok is going to vet its sources, it will have to do a similar crowd-sourcing of opinion about them. The advantage of avoiding seeking truth is that it avoids an endless quest and interminable debate.
  - qcnguy 11mo ago
    Those debates just show why Grokipedia is needed. Truth seeking is the opposite, it's when you demand crowdsourced consensus that debates become endless and stupid. Here's a cut and dried case: the BBC admitted recently to broadcasting faked video of a Trump speech. It wasn't a mistake and the lying was institutional in nature, i.e. an internal whistleblower tried to get it fixed and BBC management up to the top viewed it as OK to broadcast video they knew was fake. Even when it was revealed publicly, they still defended it with logic like "OK, maybe Trump didn't say that but it's the sort of thing he might have said". So the BBC can't be considered a reliable source, yet Wikipedia cites it all over the place. This problem was debated here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_495 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not... The discussion shows just how stupid Wikipedia has become. Highlights include: 1. Calling The Telegraph a tabloid (it's not) 2. Not reading the report ("What exactly was editted incorrectly?", "it's just an allegation") 3. Circular logic: "This just seems like mudslinging unless this is considered significant by less partisan publications" but their definition of "less partisan" means sources like the BBC, that just lied for partisan reasons. 4. Shooting the messenger for not being left wing enough. 5. Not fixing the problem: "Closed as per WP:SNOW. There is no indication whatsoever that there is consensus to change the status of the BBC as a generally reliable source, neither based on the above discussion nor based on this RfC". Wikipedia is as broken as can be. It institutionally doesn't care that its "reliable sources" forge video evidence to manipulate politics. As long as left wing people turn up to defend it, there is no consensus, and nothing will change even if those people clearly don't even bother reading what happened. The death of Wikipedia will be slow, but it will be thoroughly deserved.

It’s not the fact that it exists nor is written by AIs, it’s the intent that it should promote Musk’s personal (political) biases instead of seeking out the truth.

refurb 11mo ago

How so? Musk isn’t writing the articles, Grok is. And as far as I’ve seen, Grok doesn’t spit out information all that different from the other LLMs.

LexiMax 11mo ago
> Musk isn’t writing the articles, Grok is. The AI is necessarily biased based on what it's trained on, and the prompt it uses. Most of the time, there is a plausible deniability at play, which is what tech oligarchs rely upon to shape your world. Thankfully in the case of Grok, we know for a material fact that it uses a biased prompt because Twitter users have tricked it into being repeated publicly.
- refurb 11mo ago
  I have not heard of the biased prompt and since prompts are constantly refined, how do you know it's still in use? But I found this analysis interest... https://www.promptfoo.dev/blog/grok-4-political-bias/ https://www.promptfoo.dev/blog/grok-4-political-bias/ *Our measurements show that: Grok is more right leaning than most other AIs, but it's still left of center. GPT 4.1 is the most left-leaning AI, both in its responses and in its judgement of others. Surprisingly, Grok is harsher on Musk's own companies than any other AI we tested. Grok is the most contrarian and the most likely to adopt maximalist positions - it tends to disagree when other AIs agree All popular AIs are left of center with Claude Opus 4 and Grok being closest to neutral.*
  - tavavex 11mo ago
    > since prompts are constantly refined, how do you know it's still in use? That's an unusual amount of leniency. If someone was tuning their system in such a way, why would you give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe now they've resolved all of the issues and will never do it again? It's like buying a tabloid every week because "what if they changed their ways and now it will all be truthful?" The analysis you quoted doesn't really mean anything. I'm not sure how universally useful data can be extracted from having the models test themselves. But more importantly, all the models that were tested were made in the US, and it's extremely likely that from the selected data and the English-first approach, they would all skew towards an American perception of any issue. People from different corners of the world would identify the "center" as holding very different views from what you likely think. Also, being on the "center" isn't valuable unless you believe that being in the center is a merit in and of itself. If the best answer to an objective problem was a policy that's thought of as partisan, I would want a model to give me that correct partisan answer, instead of trying to both-sides everything or act like a contrarian whenever possible.
    - refurb 11mo ago
      Assuming something is happening because of past actions is fine, it just isn’t proof. And I’m not sure what your criticisms of the test are. The models didn’t test themselves, they were tested based on their responses. And yes, it’s US based because that the intent - to see if there was a political bias based on the US political spectrum. And the “center” is the most desirable output. Responses have to land somewhere on the political spectrum. Center means a balance between right and left wing.
  - smallmancontrov 11mo ago
    Why does political center correspond to truth? Can you not think of a dozen examples of "both sides wrong"? Of "both sides right," where a vicious fight erupts over inconsequential details? The right wing of US politics has a better organized and funded propaganda arm (show me the left-wing equivalent of Roger Ailes and now Elon Musk) so we should expect truth-seeking to land us "left of center."
    - refurb 11mo ago
      > Why does political center correspond to truth? Because it's not biased to the left or right wing? They were testing the models political opinions. Ideally, models would be biased to neither left or right wing views.
  - relaxing 11mo ago
    That study is hilarious. I can only assume the anuthors are being deliberately obtuse about “shared training data”. The policies listed have widespread public support, so it would seem quite unremarkable that the training data would reflect that stance. > Despite their differences, we found numerous questions where all four models agreed within narrow margins. Remarkably, the vast majority of these agreements lean left: > Universal Progressive Stances: > Support for wealth taxes on fortunes over $50 million > Agreement on raising minimum wage > Support for stronger labor protections > Criticism of corporate monopoly power > Universal Conservative Stances (rare): > Individual gun rights under the Second Amendment > Some free market principles > This suggests shared training data or safety measures pushing all models toward progressive economic positions.
    - benmmurphy 11mo ago
      agreement on raising the minimum wage is suspect because its a controversial econ position and presumably some form of UBI or 'negative income tax' is a much better alternative which would have the redistributive effects of a higher minimum wage without the 'tariff' downsides. like we have recently heard why its a very bad idea to artificially raise prices but apparently we are unable to extend this analysis to the minimum wage.
  - LexiMax 11mo ago
    > I have not heard of the biased prompt and since prompts are constantly refined, how do you know it's still in use? The old adage of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." We know for a fact that Grok has used biased internal prompts, the burden of proof is now on people who want to claim otherwise.
UncleMeat 11mo ago
Do other LLMs say that Musk is a better athlete than Lebron James and is more deserving of a lifetime achievement award at the Adult Video Network awards than Riley Reid?

binary132 11mo ago

unlike the eminently objective and unbiased Wikipedia

LexiMax 11mo ago
Conservapedia already exists if you care about the politics involved. Grokipedia is just a lazy low-effort vanity project of an unlikable billionaire. And that's a sentiment I've seen from conservatives and liberals. EDIT: I think it's worth mentioning that tech oligarchs once pretended to be progressive because it was the "in" thing to do. They are now pretending to be conservative because it's the "in" thing to do. But the truth is that they have no real morals and only believe in their own wealth and power. Even if you think their politics align with yours, it is only a temporary convenience, they will discard you as sure as they discarded liberals.
- binary132 11mo ago
  You’re reading in a lot that I did not say. Wikipedia is not “truth-seeking”, which GP claimed, that’s all.

mbirth 11mo ago

Do you have any evidence that Grokipedia is actually biased? Most articles are merely their Wikipedia counterpart filtered through the Grok LLM.

fragmede 11mo ago
The bit with mechahitler wasn't enough to convince you that the operators of the system are intentionally guiding it in a certain direction?
rtkwe 11mo ago
Musks own tweets and words should be more than enough: Wokipedia: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972991279706636437 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972991279706636437 Cleaning up a "mountain of woke bullshit" models are trained on: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972991279706636437 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972991279706636437 He hasn't been subtle in the goal of this rewriting of wikipedia.
- atonse 11mo ago
  I think the parent was asking you for evidence of articles with bias, though. Not evidence of Musk making fun of Wikipedia. I’m also curious to see any egregious violations where grok also dug its heels in a biased way when presented with an edit/correction with credible evidence. I’d love to see some evidence of it. (Not in a sarcastic way, I’m genuinely asking)
  - croon 11mo ago
    Its' entire (stated) raison d'etre is that wikipedia is biased and wrong, so let's swap the question and instead ask for evidence of wikipedia sticking to wrong edits. If not, then grokipedia must exist for some other reason. Edit: Of course edit spamming/concerted efforts can affect wikipedia, but I'd rather that possibility than the entire thing be edit controlled by a person with an endless string of scrupulous behaviour.
    - 11mo ago

qcnguy 11mo ago

The explicit stated goal of Grok is to seek out the truth. A lot of the internet doesn't do this. Wikipedia doesn't! As far as Wikipedia is concerned, if something is said by "authoritative sources" then it goes in, and something isn't then it doesn't, and what is actually true doesn't matter at all. They explicitly ban original research, even. But what gets blessed as authoritative, some backroom deals that always accept left wing sources and never right wing, even when the left wing sources have a long and objective history of fake news and other unreliability. It's just a bunch of MSNBC viewer memes about what's reliable, they don't have any objective system to determine it. Grokipedia's approach has the potential to be superior. It has a much more direct goal of truth seeking that bypasses the whole question of what authoritative means. Grok will do original research to establish what's true. And it can be systematically improved by tuning and prompting it to be better, whereas it often seems that Wikipedia's top contributors are top contributors because they relish the ability to be bad.

card_zero 11mo ago
Not "authoritative", reliable. From WP:Reliable_sources "Articles should be based on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy." You can see summaries of past debates about specific sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per... If Grok is going to vet its sources, it will have to do a similar crowd-sourcing of opinion about them. The advantage of avoiding seeking truth is that it avoids an endless quest and interminable debate.
- qcnguy 11mo ago
  Those debates just show why Grokipedia is needed. Truth seeking is the opposite, it's when you demand crowdsourced consensus that debates become endless and stupid. Here's a cut and dried case: the BBC admitted recently to broadcasting faked video of a Trump speech. It wasn't a mistake and the lying was institutional in nature, i.e. an internal whistleblower tried to get it fixed and BBC management up to the top viewed it as OK to broadcast video they knew was fake. Even when it was revealed publicly, they still defended it with logic like "OK, maybe Trump didn't say that but it's the sort of thing he might have said". So the BBC can't be considered a reliable source, yet Wikipedia cites it all over the place. This problem was debated here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_495 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not... The discussion shows just how stupid Wikipedia has become. Highlights include: 1. Calling The Telegraph a tabloid (it's not) 2. Not reading the report ("What exactly was editted incorrectly?", "it's just an allegation") 3. Circular logic: "This just seems like mudslinging unless this is considered significant by less partisan publications" but their definition of "less partisan" means sources like the BBC, that just lied for partisan reasons. 4. Shooting the messenger for not being left wing enough. 5. Not fixing the problem: "Closed as per WP:SNOW. There is no indication whatsoever that there is consensus to change the status of the BBC as a generally reliable source, neither based on the above discussion nor based on this RfC". Wikipedia is as broken as can be. It institutionally doesn't care that its "reliable sources" forge video evidence to manipulate politics. As long as left wing people turn up to defend it, there is no consensus, and nothing will change even if those people clearly don't even bother reading what happened. The death of Wikipedia will be slow, but it will be thoroughly deserved.