Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Grokipedia by xAI

grokipedia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–169 of 169 posts

Re: Grokipedia by xAI

#161

Post by cozzyd »

slater wrote: post #21
techblueberry wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nice touch: “ In recent decades, the party has prioritized identity-based equity policies, climate interventions, and expansive regulatory frameworks, yet empirical critiques highlight correlations between its governance in major cities and elevated crime rates, homelessness persistence, and educational stagnation amid softened enforcement and redistribution efforts.[7][8]” Which doesn’t link to anything su…

Not so fast! Heard u liked utterly whitewashed nonsense? https://grokipedia.com/page/Republican_Party_(United_States)

The search is astonishingly bad

Re: Grokipedia by xAI

#162

Post by camel_Snake »

filoleg wrote: post #152
measurablefunc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are happy to work for a for-profit corporation w/o any financial compensation then you are more than welcome to do that. Seems a bit irrational to me but that's just my opinion.

> If you are happy to work for a for-profit corporation w/o any financial compensation then you are more than welcome to do that. Seems a bit irrational to me but that's just my opinion. Not the person you are replying to, and it is a bit tangential, but you just basically described a solid chunk of open-source software work. I am not mocking open-source software work, I am mocking how reductionist the parent comment…

I don't think this is an accurate comparison. Working on open source software means you are contributing to that software, which yes may be used by for profit companies. This is more analogous to contributing to Wikipedia, which is then used by for profit companies like Grok, than it is contributing to Grok products directly, which cannot be leveraged by other tools in this ecosystem (afaik).

Re: Grokipedia by xAI

#163

Post by [deleted] »

newer_vienna wrote: post #8

Getting the cloudflare error as well. Nevertheless this reminds me of an old Curtis Yarvin post on his proposal for a meta-wikipedia. "Uberfact". He's not everyone's cup of tea but I quite enjoy this article of his - https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/08/uberfact-ul...

[deleted]

Re: Grokipedia by xAI

#164

Post by ggm »

hagbard_c wrote: post #84
thiht wrote: post #49

Thanks for sharing, added to my blocklist!

May I ask why you directly added it to your blocklist? I can see several potential reasons people block sites and I wonder which is the leading one for you.

You can't chose an identity based off the illuminati trilogy and expect people to enter a politically neutral discussion with you surely?

The entry premise for wikipedia is that "it's a discussion" is a valid meta state for an article. Do you think that entry state is a valid condition for a machine generated encyclopedia where its guiding principle is "to adjust for systematic left bias in the world view" ? (my words)

clearly, one engages with the world as it aligns to ones world view. To be continually at odds with reality as you perceive it is both tiring and ultimately unsatisfying. Grok users seek a truth grounded in confidence grok is right, and it's founder is right, and the people who seek truth elsewhere are wrong and ungrokly and stupid and dull.

Fnord!

Re: Grokipedia by xAI

#165

Post by tstrimple »

Timon3 wrote: post #93
tstrimple wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because truth is inconvenient to their world view. Better to build up the world and facts as you imagine them to be than risk learning something that contradicts deeply held beliefs.

Can you explain how that applies in this specific case? Because I can't come up with a scenario where you suggesting corrections to Grokipedia does any good. If you're correcting a lie that they actively want to spread (e.g. the "White Genocide" lie) they obviously won't accept your correction. If you're correcting a lie that they don't care about (hypothetical example: "ripe strawberries are blue") they might accept…

Let me rephrase. The type of person who would submit "corrections" to grokopedia are the types of people who are typically interested in supporting its ideological outcomes. Because they have close enough to the same world-views. The same types of people who say female instead of women outside of a medical context or complain all the time about wokeness invading their favorite media. Someone who suggests that reporting errors to grokopedia would do any good are firmly in the camp that believes in the garbage it's trying to perpetuate. That's why they support it and why they think others should submit corrections.

They know that this is being built with an explicitly partisan bias, but also know liberal folk are super weak to certain types of attacks. Attacks like "be fair" and "you can submit feedback". They are explicitly playing on liberal weaknesses all while leaning into the blatantly false representation of history. They will say "you can't judge it since you haven't provided feedback to help correct it" but that was never their intention and they just say those things because it confuses liberals. And I know I've overused "liberals" here. That's absolutely my bias slipping in. But they are the most credulous folks who will constantly try to reach across the aisle to blatant bad faith actors. If there's a better term for this, I haven't learned it in my 20+ years of being politically active in the US.

Not that I think it does any good on a site like this, but I vouched for your original comment. I completely agree with you. I was also raised in the cult and have first hand experience with many people still in it. I know why they would support and lend effort to things like these. They support all sorts of awful shit.

Re: Grokipedia by xAI

#166

Post by tomhow »

txcwg002 wrote: post #135
a0123 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you grow up to be an adult, you will understand that "objectivity"is a fiction. And an encyclopedia can absolutely do that and still present factual information based on actual research and facts. You know that just because a lady has blue hair or a person has colored skin does NOT mean that they can't be right about something or do good research. Right? You do know it, right? Because in the end, when you cry ab…

[flagged]

> You and other DEI virtue signaling white knights are engaging in the worst racism of all.

A comment like this is completely unacceptable on HN. The guidelines make it clear that we expect better than this here:

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.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

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 by xAI

#167

Post by HK-NC »

ben_w wrote: post #145
HK-NC wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mention skin tone.

Am I to understand that you are unaware that "race" is "skin tone" in much of the Anglosphere? This specific mapping, and the uselessness of the categories, is the core of why "race" is seen as a social construct. The categorical divisions that translate as "race" are different in other parts of the world, and that they are so varied demonstrates the same point: it's a socially defined categorisation system. These ot…

I actually find it interesting that skin tone seems to not matter. Being "black" comes in many shades, some lighter than a "white" person, but we know who is black. Being a dark Bangladeshi wont get you confused for an African person, or a pale Japanese person will not be seen as "white". I feel lioe what you've just proposed is a load of huff to avoid having the conversation, not you personally, just the scientific community in general if your first response is genuinely all our best minds have to say on this subject.

Re: Grokipedia by xAI

#168

Post by jacquesm »

sholladay wrote: post #160
roryirvine wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spotted surprising amounts of confidently-stated nonsense even in fairly neutral articles where Elon / xAI is unlikely to have a particular political slant. Many of the most glaring errors are linked to references which either directly contradict Grokipedia's assertion or don't mention the supposed fact one way or the other. I guess this is down to LLM hallucinations? I've not used Grok before, but the problems…

Some time ago, there was a project called Citizendium that aimed for quality over quantity, with articles written and peer-reviewed by subject matter experts who had to use their real names and working email addresses, among other requirements. I always thought that was interesting, since the main critique of Wikipedia is its open editing model. Citizendium is still around, though they've loosened some of the require…

When I was a kid you could subscribe to an encyclopedia. They were too expensive to be bought in one go and they were too expensive to make in one go. The solution was to sell them in installments and mail you the monthly addition that you could add. Obviously the marketing ploy was that if you were halfway through the 'A' that you would buy the rest of the A and once you had the 'A' then you'd buy the rest of the book.

Regardless, the business was there. Wikipedia killed all that. So if you want to create an expertly created encyclopedia anno 2025 you have a real problem: you will need to pay experts for their time somehow otherwise why would they compete with the million monkeys, but your source of revenue has been strangled by those very same monkeys, who it turns out produce content that is orders of magnitude better than anything I've ever read in a for-pay encyclopedia from before Wikipedia.

The bar to entry is insanely high.

Re: Grokipedia by xAI

#169

Post by jacquesm »

palmotea wrote: post #121
rsynnott wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect that xAI should probably have prioritised quality over quantity for the initial launch. I mean, I don't think this is _for_ people who care about quality, tbh. For those, there is wikipedia. This is more of a safe space for Musk.

> I mean, I don't think this is _for_ people who care about quality, tbh. For those, there is wikipedia. This is more of a safe space for Musk. Wikipedia isn't for those who care about quality, either. It's still quantity over quality, just not as badly as this LLM garbage.

But it is much, much better than the encyclopedias that it replaced.
Post reply on HN