Comment by EGreg
14 hours ago
I'm not a fan of Elon's software endeavors, ever since he bought Twitter and turned it into an even worse cesspool of angry political nonsense than it used to be. I don't like how he's been biasing Grok, etc.
But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia? It's a different approach and I think a valid one: trying to do with AI what people have been doing manually at Wikipedia. I'm curious to hear the substantive comparisons.
I think the issue is simply this: wikipedia trends towards unbiased info through use of the crowd. Grok, with a single owner with an ax to grind, trends towards whatever elon wants. It’s poisoned information under the control of one man - cyberpunk novels have been written about less.
A concrete example: a few weeks ago, Musk was making a big deal about how most of his massive net worth was not held in cash, and by a total coincidence the phrase "primarily derived from equity stakes rather than cash" showed up on his Grokipedia page in the section about net worth. I checked the pages of several other extremely wealthy people and none of them had such a comment.
> wikipedia trends towards unbiased info through use of the crowd
See, this is why people even give a project like Grokipedia the time of day. While in theory anyone can edit Wikipedia, in practice the moderators form a much smaller and weirder cabal, and they reject edits that go against their views. The frustration with the naive assertion that Wikipedia distills the wisdom of the crowds with the reality of Wikipedia on any page of note is what provides the psychic permission to even entertain a project with such obvious flaws as Grokipedia.
> and they reject edits that go against their views
Citation needed. See what i did there ;)
They reject edits that go against their views on tone and sourcing not political views that i am aware of - i am sure it happens from time to time but unless there’s a consistant bias in one direction this isn’t a valid criticism of the political neutrality of wikipedia.
Even if there is rampant bias in wikipedia, that’s a reason to fork it and change the structure and gatekeeping - not to replace it with a techno-authoritarian ai version controlled by a single billionaire. That’s amplifying the problem from an aggregate bias of 600,000 users who have made an edit in the last 30 days[1] to just one editor who uses ai to make it seem impartial.
[1] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/wikipedia-statistics...
2 replies →
>>I don't like how he's been biasing Grok, etc.
>>But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia
It's controlled by a guy who spends all day retweeting white supremacists and lying about his companies. Why should anyone who isn't a white supremacist use it?
They would not. The do not.