7 ms·
It’s pretty telling that Elon had to have Grok rewrite Wikipedia because the truth was too woke for him. No idea how anybody can ever take Grok seriously.
by brokencode 7mo ago
It’s pretty telling that Elon had to have Grok rewrite Wikipedia because the truth was too woke for him. No idea how anybody can ever take Grok seriously.
- squarefoot 7mo agoProbably next generations of kids being fed PragerU studying material will. Something tells me we didn't see a fraction of what's going to happen in the decades to come.
- tclancy 7mo ago[flagged]
- alex1138 7mo agoI can both not like Elon and also think Wikipedia is also very captured on some things
- freehorse 7mo agoI can understand somebody not liking wikipedia, I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
- scottyah 7mo ago> "grokipedia" as idea So you can understand someone not liking something, but you cannot understand that person liking the idea of an alternative? What is the idea for you if not just an alternative to the established service with the undesired part changed?
- debugnik 7mo agoThey meant the idea of Wikipedia rewritten by Grok (or another controversial LLM) specifically, not just any alternative.
- wat10000 7mo agoNot all alternatives are necessarily worthy. I can understand someone not liking tomatoes. I can't understand someone liking depleted uranium.
- bdangubic 7mo agowhat do you have against depleted uranium? you know what they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure :)
- hunterpayne 7mo agoMaybe ask a Ukrainian soldier which they prefer (modern armor is often made of depleted uranium). Environment shapes such preferences far more than personality.
- freehorse 7mo agoBecause not liking something does not imply liking any possible alternative. Which one is the "undesirable part changed" here? Wikipedia is written by humans, it has a not-for-profit governance model, it encompasses a large, international community of authors/editors that attempt to operate democratically, it has an investment/commitment in being an openly available and public source of information. Grokipedia, on the other hand, is AI-generated, and operated by a for-profit AI company. Even if "grokipedia" managed somehow to get traction and "overthrow" wikipedia, there is no reason on earth why a company would operate it for free and not try to make profit out of it, or use it for their ends in ways much more direct than what may or may not be happening to wikipedia. Having a billionaire basically control something that may be considered "ground truth" of information seems a bad idea, and having AI generate that an even worse one. I can understand somebody not liking something in how wikipedia is governed or operating, after all whatever has to do with getting humans work together in such a scale is bound to be challenging. I can understand somebody ideologically disagreeing with some of the stances that such a project has to take eventually (even if one tries to be neutral as much as possible, it is inevitable to avoid some clash somewhere about where this neutrality exactly lies). But grokipedia much more than "wikipedia but different ideologically". edit: just to be clear, I see a critique of the "idea of grokipedia" as eg the critique of it being a billionaire controlled, AI generated project to substitute wikipedia; a critique of the implementation would be finding flaws to actual articles in grokipedia (overall). I think the idea of it is already flawed enough.
- BurningFrog 7mo agoI'll spell out the argument: Wikipedia is fine for uncontroversial facts. The obscure ones can have individual mistakes but it's generally correct. For controversial topics, it's an eternal battle between factions of "volunteers" trying to present their view of a conflict. The articles reflect which side has the best organized influencer operations. Factual truth may or may not shine through, but as a side effect, not a result of the governing process. Grokipedia operates by Grok writing what it considers the true and interesting facts. That doesn't mean it's always right, but it's a model far less influenced by influencer operations. I wildly disagree with the critique based on the wealth of the top executive. I care about the truth and quality of the articles.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- atonse 7mo ago> I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation. Really? Have you used AI to write documentation for software? Or used AI to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet? Because, while both can have some issues (but so do humans), AI already does extremely well at both those tasks (multiple models do, look at the various labs' Deep Research products, or look at NotebookLM). Grokipedia is roughly the same concept of "take these 10,000 topics, and for each topic make a deep research report, verify stuff, etc, and make minimal changes to the existing deep research report on it. preserve citations" So it's not like it's automatically some anti-woke can't-be-trusted thing. In fact, if you trust the idea of an AI doing deep research reports, this is a generalizable and automated form of that. We can judge an idea by its merits, politics aside. I think it's a fascinating idea in general (like the idea of writing software documentation or doing deep research reports), whether it needs tweaks to remove political bias aside.
- freehorse 7mo agoNo, I don't trust an encyclopedia generated by AI. Projects with much narrower scopes are not comparable. edit: I am not very excited by AI-generated documentations either. I think that LLMs are very useful tools, but I see a potential problem when the sources of information that their usefulness is largely based on is also LLM-generated. I am afraid that this will inevitably result in drop in quality that will also affect the LLMs themselves downstream. I think we underestimate the importance that intentionality in human-written text plays in being in the training sets/context windows of LLMs for them to give relevant/useful output.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- chipotle_coyote 7mo ago> Have you used AI to write documentation for software? Hi. I have edited AI-generated first drafts of documentation -- in the last few months, so we are not talking about old and moldy models -- and describing the performance as "extremely well" is exceedingly generous. Large language models write documentation the same way they do all tasks, i.e., through statistical computation of the most likely output. So, in no particular order: - AI-authored documentation is not aware of your house style guide. (No, giving it your style guide will not help.) - AI-authored documentation will not match your house voice. (No, saying "please write this in the voice of the other documentation in this repo" will not help.) - The generated documentation will tend to be extremely generic and repetitive, often effectively duplicating other work in your documentation repo. - Internal links to other pages will often be incorrect. - Summaries will often be superfluous. - It will love "here is a common problem and here is how to fix it" sections, whether or not that's appropriate for the kind of document it's writing. (It won't distinguish reliably between tutorial documentation, reference documentation, and cookbook articles.) - The common problems it tells you how to fix are sometimes imagined and frequently not actually problems worth documenting. - It's subject to unnecessary digression, e.g., while writing a high-level overview of how to accomplish a task, it will mention that using version control is a good idea, then detour for a hundred lines giving you a quick introduction to Git. As for using AI "to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet", that sounds like an incredibly fraught idea. LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results. In practice the results of that computation and a web search frequently line up, but "frequently" is not good enough for "deep research": the fewer points of reference for a complex query there are in an LLM's training corpus, the more likely it is to generate a bullshit answer delivered with a veneer of absolute confidence. Perhaps you can make the case that that's still a good place to start, but it is absolutely not something to rely on.
- psyklic 7mo agoElon at some point threatened to have an LLM rewrite all of the training data to remove woke. I assume Grokipedia is his experiment at doing this (and perhaps hoping it will infect other training sets too?) ...
- ryandrake 7mo agoAre there actual good examples showing errors of fact on Wikipedia that are verifiably incorrect, that demonstrate how it is "captured"?
- gowld 7mo agoIt's not errors of fact, it's errors of omitted facts.
- ibero 7mo agoAre there actual good examples showing errors of omitted facts on Wikipedia that are verifiably correct, that demonstrate how it is "captured"?
- decimalenough 7mo ago[flagged]
- Auracle 7mo ago[flagged]
- epgui 7mo agoHave you considered the possibility that your opinion is just not representative of the scientific consensus?
- charcircuit 7mo agoWikipedia does not care about scientific consensus. It just summarizes "reliable" secondary sources.
- epgui 7mo agoWrong in two different ways: - this tends to approximate consensus. - Wikipedia does care, and has a policy on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Scientific_consensus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Scientific_consensus
- Rover222 7mo agoI appreciate you
- freehorse 7mo agoMany projects in his companies seem to be more and more Musk's vanity projects than ideas/products one can take seriously. This is also how tesla ended up with a huge cybertruck stock that nobody wants to buy and thus had to be bought by his other companies. And it is becoming worse and worse, especially ever since he bought twitter and sped up his twitting rates.
- dmarcos 7mo agoFWIW it looks there’s now a demand surge with the introduction of the new cheap cybertruck variant. delivery dates pushed out to the fall of 2026.
- robrain 7mo agoThat was an artificial boost created by setting a time-limit for a low price. There were ten days to buy at the price, then they put it back up. [1] [1] https://electrek.co/2026/03/01/tesla-cybertruck-awd-price-increase-70000-artificial-urgency/ https://electrek.co/2026/03/01/tesla-cybertruck-awd-price-in... EDIT: grammar
- parineum 7mo agoWhat's an artificial boost? Sounds like you're describing a sale.
- hananova 7mo agoSales are artificial boosts yes. The difference is in the connotation. A sale is given for something that people generally would buy anyway, but now more people will. An artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy. Or in other words, sales raise $high_number to $higher_number while artificial boosts raise $essentially_zero to $acceptable_number.
- dmarcos 7mo ago
- Timon3 7mo agoI take Grokipedia very seriously as a threat to society. Sure, they're happy if people read it and fall for - but the primary goal is not to convince humans, but to influence search results of current models & to poison the training data of future models. ChatGPT (and most likely other models/providers too) is already using Grokipedia as a source, so unless you're aware of the possibility and always careful, you might be served Musks newest culture war ideas without ever being the wiser. It's not enough that everyone on Twitter is forced to read his thoughts, he's trying to make sure his influence reaches everyone else too.
- danabramov 7mo agoI've seen Claude pick it up too. It's disconcerting.
- annexrichmond 7mo agoAre really suggesting everything in Wikipedia is truthful, complete, and free of all biases?
- comicjk 7mo agoNot everything on Wikipedia is true, but the parts Elon Musk hates most are probably true.
- annexrichmond 7mo ago[flagged]
- mbs159 7mo agoWell, you yiyrself did not provide any sources for asserting the argument that some of what is on Wikipedia is false
- scared_together 7mo agoNot sure if this is an example of something Musk hates, but here’s a paragraph from the “2016 presidential campaign” section of the Donald Trump article on Wikipedia. > Trump's FEC-required reports listed assets above $1.4 billion and outstanding debts of at least $265 million.[140][141] He did not release his tax returns, contrary to the practice of every major candidate since 1976 and to promises he made in 2014 and 2015 to release them if he ran for office.[142][143] I could not find any mention of tax returns on the Donald Trump page of Grokipedia. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump Grokipedia: https://grokipedia.com/page/Donald_Trump https://grokipedia.com/page/Donald_Trump
- hananova 7mo agoMaybe not all of it, but a vast majority of it is. And almost certainly the parts that drove Elon to slopify it are true.
- 7mo ago
- Rover222 7mo agoWikipedia obviously is left leaning.
- hananova 7mo agoWell yes, but so is reality. And Wikipedia as an encyclopedia is supposed to document reality. So what's the problem?
- beeflet 7mo ago[flagged]
- baublet 7mo agoAre you suggesting that academia and all of the other actual places people who learn and know stuff for a living being full of leftists is some conspiracy against you and the right wing? Touch grass, my dude. These are the thoughts of someone who spends too much time on X.
- beeflet 7mo agoI don't use X or Grok. The fact that the elite and knowledge workers in this country are generally more left-leaning is pretty evident. The right wingers in these ranks make up a distinctive subgroup. These are the thoughts of pretty much everyone everywhere in the country and this becomes apparent if you ask randoms on the street, or you have attended college lectures, or have used a dictionary, or have read wikipedia talk pages, or have compared news sources. Being a welder or a farmer or a carpenter requires "learning and knowing stuff". These right-wing associated jobs just don't produce knowledge for other people as an end product. That is what makes knowledge work an elite position; not everyone has the luxury of doing knowledge work. I take issue with your implication that we should all bow down to knowledge workers because they know better. The knowledge workers are the issue here. They are the subject of discussion. This is like when the police investigate themselves and find no wrongdoing. If we found that the population of professional athletes became dominated by a certain cultural ingroup, and eventually we failed to bring home gold medals at the olympics, we might be correct to question the state of our meritocracy wrt athleticism. Regardless of what people who "improve and use their bodies for a living" think. The US is losing intellectually and technologically to countries like China. I call into question the general legitimacy of our academic and journalistic institutions.