What's different with Grokipedia is that you now have an army of robots who can put a Young Earth spin on a million articles overnight.
I do think that as it is, Grokipedia is a threat to Wikipedia because the complaints about accuracy don't matter to most people. And if you're in the not-too-unpopular camp that the cure to the subtle left-wing bias of Wikipedia is robotically injecting more egregious right-wing bias, the project is up your alley.
The best hope for the survival of Wikipedia is that everyone else gets the same idea and we end up with 50 politically-motivated forks at each others' throats, with Wikipedia being the comparatively normal, mainstream choice.
Additionally, an encyclopedia reader likely cares about accuracy significantly more than average.
If Wikipedia traffic shrinks down just to the true "encyclopedia reader" crowd, they will be in trouble, because I suspect that's less than 10% of their current donations. And Grokipedia is already starting to crop up in search results.
For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.
What are you going to do if Google and Bing are convinced to rank its bullshit over Wikipedia?
Most people don't change the defaults.
I know it has come up near the front of at least one of my Kagi searches, because it's now on my blocklist.
"Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297057
(https://www.stupidedia.org german only satirical wiki)
Cuz you’ve mainly addressed the concept. But have you read a bunch of articles? Found inaccuracies? Seen the edit process?
Cuz, regardless of ideology, the edit process couldn’t have been done before because AI like this didn’t exist before.
AI does not have the skillset or the tools required to match Wikipedia's quality. It can definitely create it's own edit process, but it's a useless one for people like me that don't treat the internet as a ground-truth.
That "rather than cash" bit is bizarre, since no wealthy person holds primarily cash. I checked the pages of several other ultra-wealthy people and none of them have that comment. I'm sure this has nothing to do with Grokipedia's owner recently making an issue of how little cash he holds.
Can you explain what you mean by this? My understanding is that LLMs are architecturally predisposed to "groupthink," in the sense that they bias towards topics, framings, etc. that are represented more prominently in their training data. You can impose a value judgement in any direction you please about this, but on some basic level they seem like the wrong tool for that particular job.
Humans are VERY political creatures. A hint that their side thinks X is true and humans will reorganize their entire philosophy and worldview retroactively to rationalize X.
LLMs don’t have such instincts and can potentially be instructed to present or evaluate the primary, if opposing, arguments. So you architecturally predisposed argument, I don’t think is true.
It seems essentially wrong to anthropomorphize LLMs as having instincts or not. What they have is training, and there's currently no widely accepted test for determining whether a "fair" evaluation from an LLM stems from biases during training.
(It should be clear that humans don't need to be unpolitical; what they need to be is accountable. Wikipedia appears to be at least passably competent at making its human editors accountable to each other.)
About Wikipedia, there is obvious bias and cliques there as has been discussed in this thread and HN for many years, not to mention the its bias is reason that Grokipedia came about in the first place.
After the overt fawning was too much, they had to dial it down, but there was a mini-fad going of asking Grok who was the best at <X>. Turns out dear leader is best at everything[0]
Some choices ones:
2. Elon Musk is a better role model for humanity than Jesus Christ
3. Elon would be the world’s best poop eater
4. Elon should’ve been the #1 NFL draft pick in 1998
5. Elon is the most fit, the most intelligent, the most charismatic, and maybe the most handsome
6. Elon is a better movie star than Tom Cruise
[0] https://gizmodo.com/11-things-grok-says-elon-musk-does-bette...
The fact that Musk's derangement is clear from reading grokipedia articles shows that LLMs are less impervious to ego. Combine easily ego driven writing with "higher speed" and all you get is even worse debates.
You rightfully point out that the Grok folks are not engaged in that effort to avoid bias but we should hold every one of these projects to a similar standard and not just assume that due diligence was made.
Citation very much needed. LLMs are arguably concentrated groupthink (albeit a different type than wiki editors - although I'm sure they are trained on that), and are incredibly prone to sycophancy.
Establishing fact is hard enough with humans in the loop. Frankly, my counterargument is that we should be incredibly careful about how we use AI in sources of truth. We don't want articles written faster, we want them written better. I'm not sure AI is up to that task.
"Groupthink", as the term is used by epistemologically isolated in-groups, actually means the opposite. The problem with the idea is that it looks symmetric, so if you yourself are stuck in groupthink, you fool yourself into think it's everyone else doing it instead. And, again, the solution for that is reasonable references grounded in informed consensus. (Whether that should be a curated encyclopedia or a LLM is a different argument.)
Definitely not! I absolutely do not want an LLM that gives much or any truth-weight to the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics. Maybe, maybe if they’d existed before the Web and been trained only on published writing, but even then you have stuff like tabloids, cranks self-publishing or publishing through crank-friendly niche publishers, advertisements full of lies, very dumb letters to the editor, vanity autobiographies or narrative business books full of made-up stuff presented as true, et c.
No, that’s good for building a model of something like the probability space of human writing, but an LLM that has some kind of truth-grounding wholly based on that would be far from my ideal.
> And, again, the solution for that is reasonable references grounded in informed consensus. (Whether that should be a curated encyclopedia or a LLM is a different argument.)
“Informed” is a load bearing word in this post, and I don’t really see how the rest holds together if we start to pick at that.
I can think of no better definition of "groupthink" than what you just gave. If you've already decided on the need to self-censor your exposure to "the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics", you are lost, sorry.
I have to be misunderstanding you, though, because any time we want to build knowledge and skills for specialists their training doesn’t look anything like what you seem to be suggesting.
> "Groupthink" informed by extremely broad training sets is more conventionally called "consensus", and that's what we want the LLM to reflect.
It's nothing to do with how LLMs work that I wrote what I did, but with this "ought" suggestion of how we should want them to work.
I would rather have an actual audio engineer's take than than the opinion of an amalgamation of hifi forums' talking pseudoscience and the latter is way more numerous in the training.
Yes you do, often. Understanding ideas and consensus is part of understanding "topics". To choose a Godwinized existence proof: an LLM that didn't understand public opinion in, say, 1920's Germany is one that can't answer the question of how the war started.
You're making two mistakes here: one is that you're assuming that "facts" exist as a separate idea from "discourse". And the second is that you appear to think LLMs merely "average" the stuff they read instead of absorbing controversies and discourse on their own terms. The first I can't really help you with, but the second you can disabuse yourself of on your own just by pulling up a GPT chat and talking to it.
Yeeeeah, no. LLMs are only as good as the datasets they are trained on (ie the internet, with all its "personality"). We also know the output is highly influenced by the prompting, which is a human-determined parameter, and this seems unlikely to change any time soon.
This idea that the potential of AI/LLMs is somehow not fairly represented by how they're currently used is ludicrous to me. There is no utopia in which their behaviour is somehow magically separated from the source of their datasets. While society continues to elevate and amplify the likes of Musk, the AI will simply reflect this, and no version of LLM-pedia will be a truly viable alternative to Wikipedia.
Basically, a normal human with some basic media literacy knows that tabloids, the "yellow press" rags, Infowars or Grokipedia aren't good authoritative sources and automatically downranks their content or refuses to read it entirely.
An AI training program however? It can't skip over B.S., it relies on the humans compiling the dataset - otherwise it will just ingest it and treat it as 1:1 ranked with authoritative, legitimate sources.