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Tim Bray on Grokipedia

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Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#191

Post by physarum_salad »

thrance wrote: post #185
physarum_salad wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Warts and all" says it all really. What are those warts? Who's responsibility are they? Wikipedia is really not ideal for the LLM age where multiple perspectives can be rapidly generated. There are many topics where clusters of justified true beliefs and reasonable arguments may ALL be valid surrounding a certain topic. And no I am not talking about "flat earth" pages or other similar nonsense.

Do list these "alternative perspectives" that Wikipedia is allegedly unfairly silencing.

The fact you think there are none is really hilarious!

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#192

Post by spankibalt »

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…

> Its only good at basics and cannot handle complex information well.

Poppycock! Because of MediaWiki's multimedia capabilities it can handle complex information just fine, obviously much better than printed predecessors. What you mean is a Wiki's focus, which can take the form of a generalized or universal encylopedia (e. g. Wikipedia), or a specialized one, or a free-form one (Wikipedia, in practice, again). Wikipedias even negotiate integration of different information streams, e. g. up-to-date news-like information, both in the lemmata (often a huge problem, i. e. "newstickeritis"), in its own news wiki (Wikinews), or the English Wikipedia's newspaper, The Signpost.

And to take care of another utterly bizarre comment: Encylopedias are always, per defintion, also repositories of knowledge.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#193

Post by uvaursi »

These hot takes are somewhat useless honestly. People give these point-in-time opinions ignoring that the rate of improvement is exponential when it comes to software. The last three, four years of heavy AI utilization have been refreshing.

I personally treat these things the same way I treat car accidents: if an autonomous system still has accidents but has less than human drivers do, it’s a success. Given the amount of nonsense and factually incorrect things people spout, I’d still call Grok even at this early stage a major success.

Also I’m a big fan of how it ties nuanced details to better present a comprehensive story. I read both TBray’s Wiki and Groki entries. The Groki version has some solid info that I suppose I should expect of an AI that can pull a larger corpus of data in. A human editor would of course omit that, or change it, and then Wiki admins would have to lock the page as changes erupt into a silly flame war over what’s factually accurate. Because we can’t seem to agree.

Anyway - good stuff! Looking forward to more of Grok. Very fitting name, actually.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#194

Post by rsynnott »

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…

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

I would say more that it’s one of the biggest illusory values they think they are getting. An incorrect summary is worse than useless, and LLMs are very bad at ‘summarising’.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#195

Post by rsynnott »

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.

Yeah, I find it extremely grating. I’m kind of surprised that people are willing to put up with it.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#196

Post by kazga »

exoverito wrote: post #162
9dev wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

> Any condition which causes the individual to self-sterilize or not have progeny is maladaptive from an evolutionary perspective

I mean, this is just trivially wrong on a basic factual level. Look at ants, look at bees, even some mammals like mole-rats.

Not that these "biological facts" argument ever hold any water for complex social issues, but would you mind at least using actual facts?

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#197

Post by rsynnott »

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…

> But the problem type of "summarize a biased source and try to remove the bias" isn't among the ones I've seen LLMs being tested for, and this is what Elon's project lives and dies by.

And if you believe that you’ll believe anything. “Try to _change_ the bias” would be closer.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#198

Post by epistasis »

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.

> The perception of bias in Wikipedia remains,

If there's a perception of bias, where is it coming from? It's clearly perception born from extreme political bias of the performers. Addressing that sort of perception by changing the content means increasing bias.

Therefore the only logical route forward to hash out incidences of perceived bias and addressing them to expose them as the bias themselves.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#199

Post by myvoiceismypass »

yappen wrote: post #190
9dev wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t hold an entire group of people responsible for the actions of a few extremists, unless you want to stop Christians and Muslims as well. And don’t get me started on all the shit men pull off worldwide, yet I don’t see you rallying against heterosexuality?

[flagged]

> At least most Christians and Muslims accept that others don't believe in their religion and, for the most part, don't force them to act as if they do.

I've actually found Christians in America quite to be forcing their beliefs quite loudly upon everyone. Pretty wild to be personally offended by the tiny fraction of a percent that is the trans population (of which an even tinier amount is vocal as you say they are).

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#200

Post by LexiMax »

yappen wrote: post #186
tstrimple wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only seems to be a problem for bigots like you. Trans folks just want to live their lives. Why can’t you leave them the fuck alone?

[flagged]

That's not why you are obsessed with trans people. You are terrified that the next woman you ogle covetously or catcall won't have the parts you expect.

You don't care about protecting women. The only thing you care about is protecting your fragile sense of masculinity.

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