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ryandrake 3 hours ago

The concept of Grokipedia reminds me of the old (now defunct? won't load) "Conservapedia" project that basically only had detailed pages for topics where observable fact was incompatible with political ideology--so for these topics, the site showed the Alternative Facts that conformed to that ideology. If you looked up something non-political like "Traffic Light" or "Birthday Cake" there would be no article at all. Because being a complete repository of information was not an actual goal of the site.

lich_king 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Right, but the reason that Conservapedia fizzled out is that you can't really build a critical mass of human editors if the only reason your site exists is that you have a very specific view on dinosaurs and homosexuality (even among hardline conservatives, most will not share your views).

What's different with Grokipedia is that you now have an army of robots who can put a Young Earth spin on a million articles overnight.

I do think that as it is, Grokipedia is a threat to Wikipedia because the complaints about accuracy don't matter to most people. And if you're in the not-too-unpopular camp that the cure to the subtle left-wing bias of Wikipedia is robotically injecting more egregious right-wing bias, the project is up your alley.

The best hope for the survival of Wikipedia is that everyone else gets the same idea and we end up with 50 politically-motivated forks at each others' throats, with Wikipedia being the comparatively normal, mainstream choice.

Borgz 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.

Additionally, an encyclopedia reader likely cares about accuracy significantly more than average.

tptacek 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It would arguably be a benefit to Wikipedia to be pulled from Google search results, since Google prominence is the root of a huge fraction of all the misbehavior on the site.

lich_king 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nah. Wikipedia is popular because it is the #1 search result for a lot of stuff. Most of people going there just want to look up something for a homework assignment, online argument, or whatever. If Grokipedia has an error rate 5%, compared to 1% for Wikipedia, it's probably still fine.

If Wikipedia traffic shrinks down just to the true "encyclopedia reader" crowd, they will be in trouble, because I suspect that's less than 10% of their current donations. And Grokipedia is already starting to crop up in search results.

munchler an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember when Fox News was considered irrelevant compared to mainstream news outlets. Don’t underestimate the reach of billionaires with an ideological agenda.

tstrimple 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

Fox News has been the #1 rated cable news network for over two decades. They've had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC for most of their existence. Calling them anything other than "mainstream" is just supporting their propaganda. They've always branded themselves as the scrappy outsider because it plays well with their audience, not because it reflects reality.

vkou an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.

For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.

What are you going to do if Google and Bing are convinced to rank its bullshit over Wikipedia?

Most people don't change the defaults.

Marsymars 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

> For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.

I know it has come up near the front of at least one of my Kagi searches, because it's now on my blocklist.

gregoryl an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

To certain demographics, adherence to facts appears to be a left wing bias.

ilamont 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Another defunct site is Deletionpedia, which compiled articles that had been removed from Wikipedia for not meeting various criteria (usually relating to notability IIRC). The site is dead but the HN discussion lives on:

"Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297057

lukan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I rather lament that Stupidedia is now defunct, way more entertaining

(https://www.stupidedia.org german only satirical wiki)

YokoZar 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

There's still Uncyclopedia, though apparently there are 3 forks of it now?

atonse 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have you tried Grokipedia yet?

Cuz you’ve mainly addressed the concept. But have you read a bunch of articles? Found inaccuracies? Seen the edit process?

Cuz, regardless of ideology, the edit process couldn’t have been done before because AI like this didn’t exist before.

bigyabai 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, I see no reason to give AI-generated articles a second of my time. Wikipedia's best feature is the human-provided citations; you can very easily validate a claim with a hardlink to a book, article or video archive.

AI does not have the skillset or the tools required to match Wikipedia's quality. It can definitely create it's own edit process, but it's a useless one for people like me that don't treat the internet as a ground-truth.

baobabKoodaa an hour ago | parent [-]

Follow up question: have you tried smoking crack? Surely you should try smoking crack before you draw any conclusions about it being bad.

wat10000 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

"As of February 19, 2026, Musk’s net worth is estimated at $844.9 billion per Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires List, primarily derived from equity stakes rather than cash..."

That "rather than cash" bit is bizarre, since no wealthy person holds primarily cash. I checked the pages of several other ultra-wealthy people and none of them have that comment. I'm sure this has nothing to do with Grokipedia's owner recently making an issue of how little cash he holds.

throw310822 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Besides the political slant of Grokipedia, it's true that a lot of work that needed to be crowdsourced can be now packaged as work for LLMs. We all know the disadvantages of using LLMs, so let me mention some of the advantages: much higher speed, much more impervious to groupthink, cliques, and organised campaigns; truly ego-less editing and debating between "editors". Grokipedia is not viable because of Musk's derangement, but other projects, more open and publicly auditable, might come along.

woodruffw 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> much more impervious to groupthink

Can you explain what you mean by this? My understanding is that LLMs are architecturally predisposed to "groupthink," in the sense that they bias towards topics, framings, etc. that are represented more prominently in their training data. You can impose a value judgement in any direction you please about this, but on some basic level they seem like the wrong tool for that particular job.

kelipso an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If it’s not trained to be biased towards Elon Musk is always right or whatever, I think it will be much less of a problem than humans.

Humans are VERY political creatures. A hint that their side thinks X is true and humans will reorganize their entire philosophy and worldview retroactively to rationalize X.

LLMs don’t have such instincts and can potentially be instructed to present or evaluate the primary, if opposing, arguments. So you architecturally predisposed argument, I don’t think is true.

woodruffw 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> LLMs don’t have such instincts and can potentially be instructed to present or evaluate the primary, if opposing, arguments.

It seems essentially wrong to anthropomorphize LLMs as having instincts or not. What they have is training, and there's currently no widely accepted test for determining whether a "fair" evaluation from an LLM stems from biases during training.

(It should be clear that humans don't need to be unpolitical; what they need to be is accountable. Wikipedia appears to be at least passably competent at making its human editors accountable to each other.)

Rebelgecko an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There was a whole collection of posts where Grok says stuff like "Elon Musk is more athletic than LeBron James".

3eb7988a1663 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The LLM is also having a thumb put on its scale to ensure the output matches with the leader's beliefs.

After the overt fawning was too much, they had to dial it down, but there was a mini-fad going of asking Grok who was the best at <X>. Turns out dear leader is best at everything[0]

Some choices ones:

  2. Elon Musk is a better role model for humanity than Jesus Christ
  3. Elon would be the world’s best poop eater
  4. Elon should’ve been the #1 NFL draft pick in 1998
  5. Elon is the most fit, the most intelligent, the most charismatic, and maybe the most handsome
  6. Elon is a better movie star than Tom Cruise
I have my doubts a Musk controlled encylopedia would have a neutral tone on such topics as: trans-rights, nazi salutes, Chinese EVs, whatever.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/11-things-grok-says-elon-musk-does-bette...

Avshalom 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"higher speed" isn't an advantage for an encyclopedia.

The fact that Musk's derangement is clear from reading grokipedia articles shows that LLMs are less impervious to ego. Combine easily ego driven writing with "higher speed" and all you get is even worse debates.

delecti 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not an advantage for an encyclopedia that cares foremost about truth. Missing pages is a disadvantage though.

b00ty4breakfast 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

LLMs are only impervious to "groupthink" and "organized campaigns" and other biases if the people implementing them are also impervious to them, or at least doing their best to address them. This includes all the data being used and the methods they use to process it.

You rightfully point out that the Grok folks are not engaged in that effort to avoid bias but we should hold every one of these projects to a similar standard and not just assume that due diligence was made.

dghlsakjg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> much more impervious to groupthink

Citation very much needed. LLMs are arguably concentrated groupthink (albeit a different type than wiki editors - although I'm sure they are trained on that), and are incredibly prone to sycophancy.

Establishing fact is hard enough with humans in the loop. Frankly, my counterargument is that we should be incredibly careful about how we use AI in sources of truth. We don't want articles written faster, we want them written better. I'm not sure AI is up to that task.

ajross 2 hours ago | parent [-]

"Groupthink" informed by extremely broad training sets is more conventionally called "consensus", and that's what we want the LLM to reflect.

"Groupthink", as the term is used by epistemologically isolated in-groups, actually means the opposite. The problem with the idea is that it looks symmetric, so if you yourself are stuck in groupthink, you fool yourself into think it's everyone else doing it instead. And, again, the solution for that is reasonable references grounded in informed consensus. (Whether that should be a curated encyclopedia or a LLM is a different argument.)

bubblewand an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> "Groupthink" informed by extremely broad training sets is more conventionally called "consensus", and that's what we want the LLM to reflect.

Definitely not! I absolutely do not want an LLM that gives much or any truth-weight to the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics. Maybe, maybe if they’d existed before the Web and been trained only on published writing, but even then you have stuff like tabloids, cranks self-publishing or publishing through crank-friendly niche publishers, advertisements full of lies, very dumb letters to the editor, vanity autobiographies or narrative business books full of made-up stuff presented as true, et c.

No, that’s good for building a model of something like the probability space of human writing, but an LLM that has some kind of truth-grounding wholly based on that would be far from my ideal.

> And, again, the solution for that is reasonable references grounded in informed consensus. (Whether that should be a curated encyclopedia or a LLM is a different argument.)

“Informed” is a load bearing word in this post, and I don’t really see how the rest holds together if we start to pick at that.

ajross an hour ago | parent [-]

> I absolutely do not want an LLM that gives much or any truth-weight to the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics.

I can think of no better definition of "groupthink" than what you just gave. If you've already decided on the need to self-censor your exposure to "the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics", you are lost, sorry.

bubblewand 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

A spectacular amount of extant writing accessible to LLM training datasets is uninformed noise from randos online. Not my fault the internet was invented.

I have to be misunderstanding you, though, because any time we want to build knowledge and skills for specialists their training doesn’t look anything like what you seem to be suggesting.

Spivak 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Gotta be honest, when I go to an encyclopedia the last thing I want is what the mathematically average chronically online person knows and thinks about a topic. Because common misconceptions and the "facts" you see parroted on online forums on all sorts of niche topics look just like consensus but ya know… wrong.

I would rather have an actual audio engineer's take than than the opinion of an amalgamation of hifi forums' talking pseudoscience and the latter is way more numerous in the training.

greggoB 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> impervious to groupthink, cliques, and organised campaigns

Yeeeeah, no. LLMs are only as good as the datasets they are trained on (ie the internet, with all its "personality"). We also know the output is highly influenced by the prompting, which is a human-determined parameter, and this seems unlikely to change any time soon.

This idea that the potential of AI/LLMs is somehow not fairly represented by how they're currently used is ludicrous to me. There is no utopia in which their behaviour is somehow magically separated from the source of their datasets. While society continues to elevate and amplify the likes of Musk, the AI will simply reflect this, and no version of LLM-pedia will be a truly viable alternative to Wikipedia.

mschuster91 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The core problem is that AI training processes can't by itself know during training that a part of the training dataset is bad.

Basically, a normal human with some basic media literacy knows that tabloids, the "yellow press" rags, Infowars or Grokipedia aren't good authoritative sources and automatically downranks their content or refuses to read it entirely.

An AI training program however? It can't skip over B.S., it relies on the humans compiling the dataset - otherwise it will just ingest it and treat it as 1:1 ranked with authoritative, legitimate sources.

not2b 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Conservapedia had to have a person create each article and didn't have the labor or interest. Grok can spew out any number of pages on any subject, and those topics that aren't ideologically important to Musk will just be the usual LLM verbiage that might be right or might not.

weregiraffe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Who decided what is an observable fact?

tptacek an hour ago | parent | next [-]

A reliable source (WP:RS). The encyclopedia is about the citations; it's a travel atlas to the sources about a subject. Any conclusions the encyclopedia draws "itself" are secondary to the sources.

gopher_space an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The philosophy department.

Loughla an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What's your point?

AmbroseBierce 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Non-political? Birthday cakes are distributed free of charge to the guests, with same sized portions for all, that's pure and simple communism! /s