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Tim Bray on Grokipedia

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Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#121

Post by tim333 »

tptacek wrote: post #78
tshaddox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason you posted that comment: it's sometimes interesting to discuss a thing even if you dislike the thing.

I'm fine with the logic of discussing it here but can't fathom why Tim Bray thought this would be a useful post given his own objectives.

I doubt a post saying it was so boring he was unable to finish reading the page about himself is going to bring in many readers.

That's kind of been my impression too. Not that it's terribly biased or anything but just rather boring to read.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#122

Post by jameslk »

9dev wrote: post #109
jameslk wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Nothing about that seems promising! The one single thing you want from an Encyclopedia is compressing factual information into high-density overviews. You need to be able to trust the article to be faithful to its sources. Wikipedia mods are super anal about that, and for good reason! Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? Yo…

> Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? You can never trust it to be faithful with the sources.

Isn’t summarization precisely one of the biggest values people are getting from AI models?

What prevents one from mitigating hallucination problems with editors as I mentioned? Are there not other ways you can think of this might be mitigated?

> You would need to trust a single publisher with a technology that’s allowing them to crank out millions of entries and updates permanently, so fast that you could never detect subtle changes or errors or biases targeted in a specific way—and that doesn’t even account for most people, who never even bother to question an article, let alone check the sources.

How is this different from Wikipedia already? It seems that if the frequency of additions/changes is really a problem, you can slow this down. Wikipedia doesn’t just automatically let every edit take place without bots and humans reviewing changes

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#123

Post by jameslk »

f33d5173 wrote: post #118
jameslk wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Llms arem't "there" yet with respect to this sort of thing

Yes, nothing about this is “there yet” which was my point

> Having an editor is totally infeasible, at that point you might as well have the humans write the articles.

Why?

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#124

Post by keeda »

tptacek wrote: post #78
tshaddox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason you posted that comment: it's sometimes interesting to discuss a thing even if you dislike the thing.

I'm fine with the logic of discussing it here but can't fathom why Tim Bray thought this would be a useful post given his own objectives.

I don't know if this is why, but: he's in a unique position of having an article on himself on Grokipedia, and thus being able and willing to compare it with the reality as he remembers it.

That's in contrast to other topics, the nuances of which even seasoned experts could disagree about. Any discussion on that could devolve into the nuances of the topic rather than Grokipedia itself. But it's fair to assume the topmost expert on Tim Bray is Tim Bray, so we should be getting a pretty unbiased review.

As such it could be a useful insight into how Grok and Grokipedia and its owners operate.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#125

Post by onetimeusename »

LastTrain wrote: post #102
onetimeusename wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ADL was caught in a campaign making edits. I remember more details in the past but I simply can't find them now with any search engine. https://forward.com/news/467423/adl-may-have-violated-wikipe... But also the ADL is accusing others of covert campaigns: https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?... So I am sure this is a thing among corporations/NGOs. Note that I picked the ADL because I happ…

That's how Wikipedia works. People can edit it. People who are members of organizations can edit it. The edits are transparent, and the history is preserved. It is open to anyone. It is like you're saying the whole world is biased and stacked against your point of view. The example you provide doesn't suggest any kind of centralized control or gatekeeping at all. Just some interested parties trying vying to contribut…

No. I don't think I am mischaracterizing it and I did not say the whole world is biased against me. I am not the person you replied to in case you're confusing me with them. I gave an example of an astroturfing campaign and yes, the ADL did not disclose what they were doing until they got caught. I don't think that should be casually dismissed as merely just interested parties. I think it is a genuine problem with Wikipedia. I think it violates the spirit of it and I think a paid campaign could subtly influence or overwhelm pages even though it's perfectly within the rules it should be disclosed the edits were done as part of a paid campaign and not a volunteer effort. I did not claim Wikipedia was centralized either. As far as gatekeeping I don't know. I am neither claiming it exists nor denying it.

> What if I told you a single person, soon to be a trillionaire, would like to replace it with one he controls himself. Why wouldn't that bother you more?

I didn't say anything about Grokipedia. I don't have an opinion on it presently. Couldn't the same argument be applied that he's just an interested party? Grok could be used to edit Wikipedia for that matter in a covert campaign. I think both preventing LLMs and relying on them are problematic but it's probably inevitable and I may already be late to the party because I don't know what percent of edits are done by LLMs on Wikipedia but let's say it's not 0%.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#126

Post by simonw »

epistasis wrote: post #117
sunaookami wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's effectively impossible to prove, especially if you don't believe statements made by the only organization that has access to the underlying evidence.

I actually think that it's funnier if it was an emergent behavior as opposed to a deliberate decision. And it fits my mental model of how weird LLMs are, so I think unintentional really is the more likely explanation.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#127

Post by onetimeusename »

tptacek wrote: post #13
meowface wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate: Grok has historically actually been one of the biggest debunkers of right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories on Twitter, contrary to popular conception. Elon keeps trying to tweak its system prompt to make it less effective at that, but Grokipedia was worth an initial look from me out of curiosity. It took me 10 seconds to realize it was ideologically-motivated garbage and significa…

Wikipedia is probably in the running for one of the greatest contributions to public knowledge of the past 100 years, and that's a consequence of how it functions, warts and all. I don't care how good Grok is or isn't. I'm a fan of frontier model LLMs. They don't meaningfully replace Wikipedia.

What percent of edits on Wikipedia do you think are done by LLMs presently? It looks like there is a guide for detecting them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing . The way Wikipedia functions, LLMs can make edits. They can be detected, but unless you are saying they are useless I don't know what point you are making about an LLM contribution versus a human. That LLMs aren't good enough to make meaningful contributions yet?? That Grok is specifically the problem?

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#128

Post by spankibalt »

generationP wrote: post #119
spankibalt wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> "[...] conservative and anti-woke content can reach wide audiences, particularly when Elon puts his thumb on the scale."

No shit; it's always been that way since mass media became a thing. Besides, there is no such thing as quality conservative and/or "anti-woke" media. The very concept represents a contradictio in adiecto. And Elon's just the modern version of an industrialist of yesteryear. Back in the day they owned the mass media of their time: radio and television. Today its "AI"-enshittified parasocial media and ideally the infrastructure that runs those dumps.

> "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."

Bias studies have been written since Wikipedia became a staple in hoi polloi's info diet. And there's always been a whole cottage industry of pathological and practised liars (e. g. the Heritage Foundation, amongst others) catering to right-wing grievance issues. The marked difference is that the right's attacks against Wikipedia as an institution are more aggressive since Trump... completely in line with the more aggressive attacks on human rights, reason, science, and democratic institutions on part of conservatives world wide.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#129

Post by beloch »

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…

Bray brought up a really good point. The Grokipedia entry on him was several times the length of his Wikipedia entry, not just because Grok's writing style is verbose, but also because it went into exhaustive detail on insignificant parts of his life simply because the sources were online. My own brief browsings of Grokipedia have left me with the same impression. The current iteration of Grokipedia, besides being untrustworthy, wastes a lot of time beating around the bush and, frequently, off into the weeds.

Just as LLM's lack the capacity for basic logic, they also lack the kind of judgment required to pare down a topic to what is of interest to humans. I don't know if this is an insurmountable shortcoming of LLM's, but it certainly seems to be a brick wall for the current bunch.

-------------

The technology to make Grokipedia work isn't there yet. However, my real concern is the problem Grokipedia is intended to solve: Musk wants his own version of Wikipedia, with a political slant of his liking, and without any pesky human authors. He also clearly wants Wikipedia taken down[1]. This is reality control for billionaires.

Perhaps LLM generated encyclopedias could be useful, but what Musk is trying to do makes it absolutely clear that we will need to continue carefully evaluating any sources we use for bias. If Musk wants to reframe the sum of human knowledge because he doesn't like being called out for his sieg heils, only a fool would place any trust in the result.

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

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#130

Post by smitty1e »

Grokipedia might have a better present-tense understanding as it hoovers up data.

One great feature of Wikipedia is being able to download it and query a local shapshot.

As a technical matter, Grokipedia could do something like that, eventually. Does not appear to support snapshots at the 0.1 version.

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