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Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia

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Re: Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia

#32

This seems like an old article, but probably still true today What I don't get is, why wouldn't Elon just make a good version of Grokipedia. It seems way easier than continually telling his 200MM+ followers how great a deeply broken product is.

Could it be, could it possibly be, because he’s not an honest broker but a deeply wounded, emotionally immature malignant narcissist who needs the world to conform to his darkest viewpoints so that he can tell himself that he is not the imperfect person he knows himself to be?

[dead]

Re: Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia

#33
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would a "good" version be ? Start putting real facts into a site and before you know it you're "woke" again with such untruths as Slavery was Bad, Biden won the 2020 Election and of course Full Self Driving is Impossible without Lidar

Seriously. My Christmas wish is for everyone to understand that Grokipedia was not created in good faith, by someone who wants free and open knowledge to flourish.

People still tune in to watch Alex Jones. I wouldn't hold my breath.

Re: Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia

#34

It's illuminating to see how the Twitter Grok and the Web Grok differ. Twitter Grok clearly either has a different system prompt or some fine-tuning to effectively evade saying anything negative about the administration or Elon. To the point where it will say Elon is more athletic than LeBron ( https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk... ). This is going to be a pretty big problem with both closed…

Is perjury a credible threat to the people with the resources to train and propagate LLMs? Especially in the context of recent high profile examples related to perjury and contempt of court?

I suspect soon there will be laws to protect the LLM proprietors in the name of AI arms race/national security

Re: Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia

#35
post #28

I've been reading a lot of Don Delillo lately and so I wanted to see how Grokipedia page on him fares. I found the "Critiques of elitism" section and noticed this sentence: "Reviews of Mao II (1991), for instance, highlighted the novel's focus on a performance artist protagonist as emblematic of this tendency, with detractors accusing DeLillo of prioritizing esoteric concerns over relatable human experiences, thereby…

But is there any reason to not treat this as Wikipedia? As in, just suggest a correction?

See all the heavily biased content on the Joe Biden and Donald Trump articles?

Why not start there? Try to see if you can contribute a more neutral voice.

My guess is that the tone of these articles we see now is only the beginning. This thing is only a month old.

Then this will become the source of truth in the LLMs.

I cannot believe they've gone so against the spirit of contributors and that there's no legal recourse to stop this.

Open source and open content didn't bare enough fangs. It shouldn't have allowed profit.

We build open source for big tech. They use it (Linux, Redis, Elasticsearch, Python, etc.) to profit, keep us from owning the machines and systems (AWS) that concentrate and mechanize that profit. They then corral our labor, lay off, and move jobs overseas.

They expand into every industry and inject massive amounts of money to destabilize the incumbents. We literally just watched them dismantle the entire US film industry in just three years and swallow it whole. Tech is picking the bones dry.

And now it's happening with the media we create too.

If the pendulum of power swings, we MUST dismantle these companies. And we can't be slow like Lina Khan. It must be fast and furious like Project 2025.

We also need to weaponize our open source licenses.

Re: Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia

#36
Musk has previously called for Wikipedia to be defunded and boycotted[1].

The linked reference is from January, just after Musk bought an election and when he was plugged directly into U.S. presidential authority. If he'd had the self-control to manage his interactions with Trump in a way that didn't rapidly lead to breakdown, things could be looking very grim for Wikipedia by now.

As with so many other aspects of the Trump administration, what's going on illustrates weaknesses in the U.S. system of government that could lead to things that are far worse than what we are currently seeing if the people involved were just a little bit more competent.

Grokipedia is far more than just the anti-Wikipedia. It's a sign of things to come if we don't start hardening the systems, governmental or otherwise, that keep Wikipedia available to the public.

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[1]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-elon...

Re: Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia

#37

This seems like an old article, but probably still true today What I don't get is, why wouldn't Elon just make a good version of Grokipedia. It seems way easier than continually telling his 200MM+ followers how great a deeply broken product is.

> What I don't get is, why wouldn't Elon just make a good version of Grokipedia.

The way to make your MVP less shitty is to throw time and money at iterating it. Which I understand is what's happening.

I'm sure in a few years it'll either be quite good, or have clearly highlighted some fundamental limitations of language models as a class.

Re: Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia

#38

If Wikipedia was not real, it would sound like a naive utopian thing you’d read in a bad paperback. Multi-language repository of basically all human knowledge that’s extremely resistant to government capture and contributed by volunteers totally transparently? Bullshit. And yet … there it is.

Wikipedia is not resistant to capture. It is structurally exposed to coordinated editing groups, and the platform has no robust way to detect or neutralize them. On politically or strategically important pages, especially where state or financial interests are involved, organized paid editors can and do shape coverage, dominate talk pages, and crowd out dissenting contributions.

There have been many editing scandals over the years. While one could argue that editing cabals being caught and banned demonstrates that Wikipedia has structural resistance to such behavior, the scandals that become public are, almost by definition, the ones that were clumsy enough to get caught. The mechanisms that appear robust largely work only against amateurish, poorly hidden or commercially indiscreet operations. What they do not reliably detect are long-term, well-resourced, politically motivated or state-aligned editing groups that behave patiently, avoid obvious sockpuppeting footprints, and stay within procedural boundaries while still dominating page direction.

Re: Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia

#39
The need to hate on Grokipedia is weird to me. It’s another site on the web. It’s an experiment with LLMs. Who cares?

It can be filled with a bunch of nonsense, whatever. The internet is like that. Maybe it’ll actually become something useful. Or it’ll inspire something useful.

Regardless, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so these articles just give the project airtime. Even commenters here mention they haven’t heard of it until now.

Re: Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia

#40

It's illuminating to see how the Twitter Grok and the Web Grok differ. Twitter Grok clearly either has a different system prompt or some fine-tuning to effectively evade saying anything negative about the administration or Elon. To the point where it will say Elon is more athletic than LeBron ( https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk... ). This is going to be a pretty big problem with both closed…

> If you manipulate your AI to deliberately push political preferences, that is your right I guess but IMO I'd appreciate some regulation saying you should be required to disclose that under penalty of perjury.

People (and especially companies) are already permitted to make legally enforceable guarantees and statements about their AI. Why do we need extra machinery?

You can assume that anyone who doesn't make such strong statements took the easy way out.

To spell it out: the law doesn't spell out that companies can swear oaths, but they can write whatever statement they want to be liable for in their investor prospectus and then in the US any enterprising lawyer can assemble a bunch of shareholders to bring a suit for securities fraud, if the company is lying.

Slightly more everyday, but with fewer legal teeth: the company can also explicitly make the relevant statements in their ads, and then they can be gotten via misleading advertisement laws.

If you notice that they use weasel wording in their ads or prospectus, instead of simple and strong language that a judge would nail them to, disregard the statements.

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