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Tim Bray on Grokipedia

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Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#111

Post by tim333 »

ef2k wrote: post #73

Maybe it's just me, but reading through LLM generated prose becomes a drag very quickly. The em dashes sprinkled everywhere, the "it's not this, it's that" style of writing. I even tried listening to it and it's still exhausting. Maybe it's the ubiquity of it nowadays that is making me jaded, but I tend to appreciate terrible writing, like I'm doing in this comment, more nowadays.

I find the Grokipedia writing especially a drag. I don't think it's em dashes and similar so much as the ideas not being clear. In good writing the writer normally has a clear idea in mind and is communicating it but the Grokipedia writing is kind of a waffley mess. I guess maybe because LLMs don't have much of an idea in mind so much as stringing words together.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#112

Post by meowface »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #84
the_gastropod wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. What common conspiracy theories that have actual political impact have water carried by left-wing politicians? Here's a short list of RW conspiracy theories with real life political consequences: - Antivax conspiracies - Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States ("birther" conspiracy) - Biden / Ukraine conspiracy theory - The litany of Covid-19 conspiracy theories - The "deep state" conspiracy theory - Sa…

I won’t go to bat for anything near a full equivocation in contemporary politics, but it’s worth remembering antivax was heavily left-coded prior to Covid. I don’t think approximately anyone has actually good epistemology - just biases that fluctuate in how much they affect the real world. Left wing academics and outlets carrying water for people like Pol Pot in the late 20th century because they liked the idea of co…

Even before COVID things were shifting - the antivax part of the left at that time were mostly only sort of aesthetically on the left. I think this Twitter exchange sums up my feelings about that counterargument: https://i.imgur.com/gNXJ6Wl.jpeg

Also, I think it's important to separate "left of center" and "leftist". Liberals and leftists are very different. "Progressive left-liberals" are fans of democracy and freedom and don't like bigotry and authoritarianism and Trump. "Leftists" are often fans of Lenin and Stalin and Pol Pot and killing groups of people who aren't ideologically aligned and instating one-party dictatorships and violently suppressing dissent. In leftist parlance, "leftist" = "Marxist" while "liberal" = "capitalist belonging to the moderate wing of fascism". In the US, politics is best described as not two but four factions: leftists, liberals, rightists, and neo-Nazis. Often neo-Nazis will form coalitions with the rightists to help achieve major goals; historically leftists would form coalitions with the liberals, but this seems to be occurring less and less.

Although leftists will insist the notion is absurd and anti-intellectual, horseshoe theory contains a lot of truth in it.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#113

Post by 9dev »

__s wrote: post #59
generationP wrote: post #25

Wondering if the project will get better from the pushback or will just be folded like one of Elon's many ADHD experiments. In a sense, encyclopedias should be easy for LLMs: they are meant to survey and summarize well-documented material rather than contain novel insights; they are often imprecise and muddled already (look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree and see how many conventions coexist without an e…

> can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up what if your goal is for wikipedia to be biased in your favor?

No no no, you see, you got it all wrong. If the Wikipedia article on, let’s say, transsexualism, says that’s an orientation, not a disease—then that’s leftist bias. Removing that bias means correcting it to say it’s a mental illness, obviously. That makes the article unbiased, pure truth.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#114

Post by nickthegreek »

alyxya wrote: post #89
MallocVoidstar wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of external citations, so rather than relying on a model to recall information internally, it’s likely effectively just summarizing external references. And according to Tim Bray, it's doing that badly. > All the references are just URLs and at least some of them entirely fail to support the text.

It’s the first release, so I expect it to get better over time. I didn’t care for ChatGPT when it was first released and thought it wouldn’t be trustworthy, but it’s much better now.

Why release an untrustworthy encyclopedia at all? It doesn’t appear to be better than the existing options in any way and worse in many.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#115

Post by quantified »

bebb wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #2

Why give it oxygen?

Because it's a genuinely good idea, and hopefully one for which the execution will be improved upon over time. In theory, using LLMs to summarize knowledge could produce a less biased and more comprehensive output than human-written encyclopedias. Whether Grokipedia will meet that challenge remains to be seen. But even if it doesn't, there's opportunity for other prospective encyclopedia generators to do so.

Summarizing all the knowledge is very very far from summarizing all that is written. All it takes is including everything published. The earth must be flat. Disease is caused by bad morals. Etc etc.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#116

Post by epistasis »

bebb wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #2

Why give it oxygen?

Because it's a genuinely good idea, and hopefully one for which the execution will be improved upon over time. In theory, using LLMs to summarize knowledge could produce a less biased and more comprehensive output than human-written encyclopedias. Whether Grokipedia will meet that challenge remains to be seen. But even if it doesn't, there's opportunity for other prospective encyclopedia generators to do so.

I don't why an LLM would be better in theory. The Wikipedia process is created to manage bias. LLMs are created to repeat the input data, and will therefore be quite biased towards the training data.

Humans looking through sources, applying knowledge of print articles and real world experiences to sift through the data, that seems far more valuable.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#117

Post by epistasis »

sunaookami wrote: post #74
siliconc0w wrote: post #61

Not sure it still does this but for awhile if you asked Grok a question about a sensitive topic and expanded the thinking, it said it was searching Elon's twitter history for its ground truth perspective. So instead of a Truth-maximizing AI, it's an Elon-maximizing AI.

This was unintended as observed by Simon here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/ and confirmed by xAI themselves here: https://x.com/xai/status/1945039609840185489 >Another was that if you ask it “What do you think?” the model reasons that as an AI it doesn’t have an opinion but knowing it was Grok 4 by xAI searches to see what xAI or Elon Musk might have said on a topic to align itself with the compan…

There's a chance it was unintended, but no proof of that.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#118

Post by f33d5173 »

jameslk wrote: post #95
hocuspocus wrote: post #83

I checked a topic I care about, and that I have personally researched because the publicly available information is pretty bad. The article is even worse than the one on Wikipedia. It follows the same structure but fails to tell a coherent story. It references random people on Reddit (!) that don't even support the point it's trying to make. Not that the information on Reddit is particularly good to begin with, even…

It was just launched? I remember when Wikipedia was pretty useless early on. The concept of using an LLM to take a ton of information and distill it down into encyclopedia form seems promising with iteration and refinement. If they add in an editor step to clean things up, that would likely help a lot (not sure if maybe they already do this)

It really isn't a promising idea at all. Llms arem't "there" yet with respect to this sort of thing. Having an editor is totally infeasible, at that point you might as well have the humans write the articles.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#119

Post by generationP »

spankibalt wrote: post #105
generationP wrote: post #25

Wondering if the project will get better from the pushback or will just be folded like one of Elon's many ADHD experiments. In a sense, encyclopedias should be easy for LLMs: they are meant to survey and summarize well-documented material rather than contain novel insights; they are often imprecise and muddled already (look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree and see how many conventions coexist without an e…

> "If I were doing a project like this, I would hire a few dozen topical experts to go over the WP articles relevant to their fields and comment on their biases [...] The results can then be published as a study, and can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up [...]" One thing I love about the Wikipedias (plural, as they're all different orgs): anyone "in the know" can very quickly tell who's got…

Don't forget that public opinion and the media landscape are quite different in 2025 from what they were in the 2010s when most prior studies on WP bias have been written. Sufficiently pertinent (sadly this isn't synonymous with high quality) conservative and anti-woke content can reach wide audiences, particularly when Elon puts his thumb on the scale. Besides, to my knowledge, none of the prior attempts at studying WP bias has even tried to make a big enough fuss to change said bias; the final outcomes of the studies were conference papers.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#120

Post by generationP »

physarum_salad wrote: post #49

"Wikipedia, in my mind, has two main purposes: A quick visit to find out the basics about some city or person or plant or whatever, or a deep-dive to find out what we really know about genetic linkages to autism or Bach’s relationship with Frederick the Great or whatever." Completely agree with the first purpose but would never use wikipedia for the second purpose. Its only good at basics and cannot handle complex in…

Yeah, encyclopedias are meant to be indexes to knowledge, not repositories thereof. The WP feature-creeped its way to the latter, but it is not reliably good at it, and I'm not sure if there is an easy way to tell how good a given page is without knowing the subject in the first place.
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