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Tim Bray on Grokipedia

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Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#141

Post by apical_dendrite »

smitty1e wrote: post #132
epistasis wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. The perception of bias in Wikipedia remains, and if LLMs can detect and correct for bias, then Grokipedia seems at least a theoretical win. I'm happy with at least a set of links for further research on a topic of interest.

Is there some objective standard for what is biased? For many people (including Elon Musk) biased just means something that they disagree with.

When grok says something factual that Elon doesn't like, he puts his thumb on the scale and changes how grok responds (see the whole South African white 'genocide' business). So why should we trust that an LLM will objectively detect bias, when the people in charge of training that LLM prefer that it regurgitate their preferred story, rather than what is objectively true?

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#142

Post by dr_kretyn »

Interesting that only now I'm learning about Grokipedia. Never heard of it until someone said it's bad so my natural instinct is to check it out.

Guess that's plus one for "it doesn't matter what they say as long as they say."

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#143

Post by davidguetta »

Grokipedia is VERY rough to read at the moment, and has a clear pro-capitalist / 'classical right wing' bias (reading the economic pages).

However it's still 0.1, we'll see what the v1 will look like.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#144

Post by dragonwriter »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #141
smitty1e wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The perception of bias in Wikipedia remains, and if LLMs can detect and correct for bias, then Grokipedia seems at least a theoretical win. I'm happy with at least a set of links for further research on a topic of interest.

Is there some objective standard for what is biased? For many people (including Elon Musk) biased just means something that they disagree with. When grok says something factual that Elon doesn't like, he puts his thumb on the scale and changes how grok responds (see the whole South African white 'genocide' business). So why should we trust that an LLM will objectively detect bias, when the people in charge of trainin…

> Is there some objective standard for what is biased?

Generally, no.

With a limited domain of verifiable facts, you could perhaps measure a degree of deviation from fact across different questions, though how you get a distance measure for not just one question but that meaningfully aggregates across multiple is slippery without getting into subjective areas. Constructing a measure of directionality would be even harder to do objectively, too.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#145

Post by [deleted] »

smitty1e wrote: post #132
epistasis wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. The perception of bias in Wikipedia remains, and if LLMs can detect and correct for bias, then Grokipedia seems at least a theoretical win. I'm happy with at least a set of links for further research on a topic of interest.

[deleted]

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#146

Post by madeofpalk »

dr_kretyn wrote: post #142

Interesting that only now I'm learning about Grokipedia. Never heard of it until someone said it's bad so my natural instinct is to check it out. Guess that's plus one for "it doesn't matter what they say as long as they say."

I mean it only came out this week. So you heard about it immediately on launch.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#147

Post by skeeter2020 »

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…

what I think it IS good at is parlaying the first purpose into a broad, meandering journey of the basics. I would never use it for deep study of genetics & autism or Bach and Fredrick the Great, but I love following some shallow thread that travels across all of them.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#148

Post by madeofpalk »

jameslk wrote: post #122
9dev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s just a different class of problem.

Human editors making mistakes is more tractable than an LLM making a literally random guess (what’s the temperature for these articles?) at what to include?

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#149

Post by bawolff »

ares623 wrote: post #107
mlmonkey wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you insisted. This is from a couple of years ago, and I have moved on to never donating to Wikipedia again, so take it FWIW. I pointed out that India had reduced extreme poverty from ~16% in 2013 to ~2% in 2022. This is directly from a World Bank report: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/0997221042225345... One would think this would be reliable? One would be wrong since this is deemed to be "pro Modi…

OP delivered. I'm not a Wikipedia editor so I don't know what kind of sources are allowed, but just on a gut-feel, that worldbank.org source seems okay?

Its very unlikely he was blocked for the specific sources he used. More likely he was banned for his conduct in a debate, potentially about those sources. Its generally very hard to be banned for "being wrong" on Wikipedia, usually people are banned for how they interact with other people, which can happen both to people who are "right" as well as people who are "wrong" (being in the right is not a valid reason to be an asshole as the saying goes). For example if he engaged in an edit war about these sources, that would still be enough to blocked even if he was correct because edit wars are an inapropriate way to handle disputes.

Its also possible the sources might have been fine but OP's interpretation of them was not. For example if he was using them to support something they didn't say or drawing his own conclusions from them beyond what the text of the source says.

This is all speculation of course. If OP provided his username we would be able to see for sure as it would be a matter of public record.

For reference both of the urls OP cites are currently used on Wikipedia. The first in the article economy of India, the second on the article for Jal Jeevan Mission, so at least in modern times Wikipedia is ok with those sources

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#150

Post by StephenHerlihyy »

I don’t really know who Tim Bray is and until now I had never been to Grokipedia. I don’t really like Grok - I tried Superheavy and it was slow, bloated and no better than Claude Opus.

But I have a bad habit of fact checking. It’s the engineer in me. You tell me something, I instinctively verify. In the linked article, sub-section, ‘References’, Mr. Bray opines about a reference not directly relating to the content cited. So I went to Grokipedia for the first time ever and checked.

Mr. Bray’s quote of a quote he quote couldn’t find is misleading. The sentence on Grokipedia includes 2 referencee of which he includes only the first. This first reference relates to his work with the FTC. The second part of the sentence relates to the second reference. Specifically on Grokipedia in the Tim Bray article linked reference number 50, paragraph 756 cleanly addresses the issue raised by Mr. Bray.

After that I stopped reading, still don’t know or care who Tim Bray is and don’t plan on using either Grokipedia or Grok in the near future.

Perhaps Mr. Bray’s did not fully explore the references or perhaps there was malice. I don’t know. Horseshoe theory applies. Pure pro- positions and pure anti- positions are idiotic and should be filtered accordingly. Filter thusly applied.

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