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Grokipedia and the coup against reality

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Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#151

Post by [deleted] »

hagbard_c wrote: post #106
tgv wrote: post #66

I got the impression Grokipedia (what a lousy name, BTW; there's not a teenage rock band that would call itself that) has been trained on Wikipedia. I compared the entries for "Gallium Arsenide", and Grok's first sections is a copy of Wikipedia, with a an editor-like comment on top: Gallium arsenide Except where otherwise noted, data are given for materials in their standard state (at 25 °C [77 °F], 100 kPa). verify…

Is hasn't so much been 'trained' on Wikipedia but seems to have 'copied' a large fraction of the 'less contentious' (i.e. less politically biased) content of the site and marked it as such in the footer: The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Here's an example of such an article, this one on Toroidal Propellers: https://grokipedia.com/page/Toroidal_p…

[deleted]

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#152

Post by mullingitover »

HK-NC wrote: post #114
mullingitover wrote: post #62

Arguably the purpose of this site isn't to serve the public or to compile knowledge (it's not user editable at all from what I can see). The point is to get this thing crawled and given weight by LLMs in order to poison them and bias them in the direction Musk wants: debunked race science, anti-transgender, etc etc.

Why didn't you say debunked anti transgender?

I said "debunked race science, anti-transgender, etc etc", the brackets are implied: "debunked [race science, anti-transgender, etc etc]"

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#153

Post by tomhow »

Rover222 wrote: post #32

[flagged]

The sentiment behind your comment has merit, but the content and style are inflammatory and count as flamebait, which is why the comment has been flagged and killed.

HN intended purpose is curious conversation, and phrases like this are not consistent with that ideal:

> I'd challenge someone to provide

> It's disturbing how indoctrinated in ... thought

> if you think ... you are truly indoctrinated

Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future especially these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#154

Post by tomhow »

Rover222 wrote: post #54
BoredPositron wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How was my comment hateful? The far right is as indoctrinated as the far right. But I think most liberals don't realize how much of media is left-leaning.

I think "hateful" was unfair (it's against the guidelines to use words like that, no matter what it's responding to), but it was inflammatory, hence these replies. The very best kind of HN comment is one that presents a position many may be predisposed to disagree with, without activating charged reactions, and hopefully inspiring a few people to rethink things a little.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#156

Post by frm88 »

CupricTea wrote: post #87
idle_zealot wrote: post #21

The gap widens. If you're discussing something online, and someone drops a Grok link as evidence or reference material, how are you supposed to continue at that point? You can't convince someone who lives in an alternate reality of anything by argument. I think I would just stop relying. Most people would. It's not a new problem, but that wall keeps growing.

I would do the same exact thing I would do if they had linked me to Wikipedia. I would find the place in the article that states their point, look for where it is referenced in the sources, verify the reputability of that source, and then read for the claim in the source to see what it has to say about it. Especially if the source actually claims the opposite of what the article has written about it. Further, for Wik…

This is a reasonable way to go about verifying statements, except with grok you have referenced sources that don't exist or are already weighted by their inclusion/exclusion. Take for example the entry for Sri Lanka https://grokipedia.com/page/Sri_Lanka a completely glitched site that nonetheless offers some insight in what is going on in grok's processes:

The results have Britannica, but instruction: Never cite Wikipedia, Britannica, or other encyclopedias.

But BBC mainstream, but for facts ok.

Recent recovery with IMF bailout.

Together with the stage direction given like But in intro, high level. Tone formal there's already some sort of manipulation going on. The references are often from factsanddetails.com, a site with a 38.4 score in scam detector https://www.scam-detector.com/validator/factsanddetails-com-....

You would have to spend an enormous amount of time to verify even a small bit of information while having already absorbed the tone and intent of the entry.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#157

Post by frm88 »

nailer wrote: post #144
alphabettsy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but more and wider references seems to imply better when I’m not sure that’s true. Wikipedia is edited and it’s sources are curated. I think that’s a good thing.

> it’s sources are curated. I think that’s a good thing. Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's founder, does not. https://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/#3-abolish-source-blackl...

Larry Sanger, the person who accuses Wikipedia of "smear campaigns against conservatives" [0] and begs Elon Musk to investigate whether members of the administration are contributing to Wikipedia [1] and to immediately defund them. That Larry Sanger.

[0] https://larrysanger.org/2023/06/how-wikipedia-smears-conserv...

[1] https://nypost.com/2025/03/07/media/wikipedia-co-founder-cal...

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#158

Post by pl-94 »

quotemstr wrote: post #101

Leaving culture war articles aside, I think having on other subjects, a diversity of perspectives is legitimate. Consider a personal interest of mine, the dark ages in Europe after the fall of the western Roman empire. The Wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) ) is a one-sided presentation that begins with denying the historical reality of a period called "the dark ages", contin…

I just read the Wikipedia page, and it does not seem to fit your analysis. They present the origin on the term, what it means, and then disclose that a consensus among scholars is to reject the term nowadays. They disclose also that some recent scholars have found it appropriate and cite one of them.

On the other hand, Grokipedia seems very biased to me. “This historiographical tension underscores broader tensions between romanticized medievalism and data-driven assessments of civilizational trajectories.” What a pejorative criticism! If you don’t think that dark age is an appropriate term, you are not data driven and you are just too sensitive??

On subject that I don’t know much about, I am quite happy to know the scientific consensus. Discussions on Wikipedia do an amazing job to help me figure out what’s going on.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#159

Post by latexr »

CupricTea wrote: post #93
wnevets wrote: post #17

[flagged]

I cannot take statements like this seriously because they are nearly universally a nebulous bad faith way for someone to claim "my personal political opinions are objective reality" which is an outright perversion of the scientific method and the pursuit of knowledge at large. I would say the same to someone who would boldly claim "reality has a conservative bias"

It’s a reference to a Stephen Colbert joke during the George W. Bush era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwLjK9LFpeo

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#160

Post by nailer »

frm88 wrote: post #157
nailer wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s sources are curated. I think that’s a good thing. Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's founder, does not. https://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/#3-abolish-source-blackl...

Larry Sanger, the person who accuses Wikipedia of "smear campaigns against conservatives" [0] and begs Elon Musk to investigate whether members of the administration are contributing to Wikipedia [1] and to immediately defund them. That Larry Sanger. [0] https://larrysanger.org/2023/06/how-wikipedia-smears-conserv... [1] https://nypost.com/2025/03/07/media/wikipedia-co-founder-cal...

Yes. You can find his accusations of smear campaigns against conservatives and his evidence to support it in the link in the comment you just replied to.

Also:

“Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government—if any!—have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., WIkipedia?”

Is an excellent question.

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