> Joe Biden

> These outcomes, alongside visible signs of cognitive impairment that prompted his July 2024 decision to forgo reelection, defined a presidency criticized for prioritizing progressive spending over fiscal and security prudence.

https://grokipedia.com/page/Joe_Biden

> Donald Trump

> His first term featured economic policies such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and individual rates for many brackets, contributing to pre-pandemic unemployment lows of 3.5% and stock market gains exceeding 50% on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

https://grokipedia.com/page/Donald_Trump

I bet the people contributing to Wikipedia did not consent to this. I certainly had no idea my contributions would be used to bootstrap something like this.

Like with the hyperscalers' rip off of Open Source, it turns out that the things you give away can be weaponized against you.

I could have never imagined this outcome. Their free labor created something to use against you.

Just like those Redis and Elasticsearch commits that now fund a trillion dollar conglomerate's takeover of American journalism and media.

1. A banner begging for money, claiming Wikipedia might shut down if you don't donate. It's fraud against the users and has been for years. They have much more money than Wikipedia needs. Nearly all the money people donate thinking it's going to Wikipedia goes to far-left NGOs instead. That dishonesty, by itself, should make Wikipedia widely hated by all who prioritize honesty and fairness. It's amazing they aren't prosecuted for it.

2. The second paragraph makes reference to "several sources", "studies" and "a neo Nazi website", but no citations are given and none of these sources, studies or sites are named. It's gossip with no attempt at being encyclopedic.

3. It claims Grokipedia's sources have "very low credibility such as Twitter". Using the old name is a certainly deliberate factual error. When they're willing to engage in petty deception about something as trivial as a corporate rebrand, the idea Wikipedia is encyclopedic is absurd. And X is often a primary source! For many topics you can't get more credible or reliable than X because it's where the conversations or announcements originally happened. For years, people have reported that they can't get false claims about their own opinions corrected on Wikipedia because their own words aren't accepted as authoritative until they've been repeated by the New York Times or the Guardian. Now Wikipedia is holding up the obvious fix for this as a problem.

Only people with extreme ideological blinders could read this stuff and not see the problems with Wikipedia.

Grokipedia's opening about Wikipedia is takes a much more neutral stance, and cites high quality sources. Where Wikipedia refers to sources and studies without naming them, Grokipedia links to specific high quality studies and an article written by Larry Sanger, a primary source.

Wikipedia is going to end up like Bluesky, an isolated corner of the internet where people increasingly filter-bubble themselves into madness.

1: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-grokipedia-...

Start putting real facts into a site and before you know it you're "woke" again with such untruths as Slavery was Bad, Biden won the 2020 Election and of course Full Self Driving is Impossible without Lidar

The way to make your MVP less shitty is to throw time and money at iterating it. Which I understand is what's happening.

I'm sure in a few years it'll either be quite good, or have clearly highlighted some fundamental limitations of language models as a class.

The problem is in the assumption/story/belief that "Intelligence" is "magic" can be "perfected". It's not true. Philosophers have known it forever. And the AI hypestorm will remind everyone how over rated intelligence actually is.

Intelligence can produce Socratic thought. It can also get Socrates killed. It can produce Aristotle and chase Aristotle out of the village. It can produce Einstein and make him depressed. It can produce Galileo and Gandhi and pretend what they say should be deleted.

People are told all the time Brains/Intelligence are special. Its not true. Even if human brains disappear tomorrow sky is not going to fall. Life and the universe will carry on happily on their merry way.

What can be called special is what happens to Information flowing through thousands and thousands of brains over thousands and thousands of years. What Information survives that process can be interesting. But its no where close to the what we see with Photosynthesis or the Krebs Cycle that emerges out of similar process of Information flowing through microbes.

The info through these processes constantly gets misplaced/corrupted/co-opted/deleted etc. Look at the Bible. Lot of people aren't impressed with it either. Yet it has lasted the downfall of nations, empires and kings.

It's survival has nothing to do with the quality of Information within it - https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152

The same applies to both wikipedia and grokpedia or whatever is produced next through "intelligence".

Once you realize your own brain is very imperfect you don't spend so much time worrying about chimp troupe drama generated through those brains. It's called flourishing through detachment - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4mgJpgeC1g&t=100s

People (and especially companies) are already permitted to make legally enforceable guarantees and statements about their AI. Why do we need extra machinery?

You can assume that anyone who doesn't make such strong statements took the easy way out.

To spell it out: the law doesn't spell out that companies can swear oaths, but they can write whatever statement they want to be liable for in their investor prospectus and then in the US any enterprising lawyer can assemble a bunch of shareholders to bring a suit for securities fraud, if the company is lying.

Slightly more everyday, but with fewer legal teeth: the company can also explicitly make the relevant statements in their ads, and then they can be gotten via misleading advertisement laws.

If you notice that they use weasel wording in their ads or prospectus, instead of simple and strong language that a judge would nail them to, disregard the statements.

Wait... you do know how LLMs work, right?

Sounds more like the world's least efficient way of querying the Median LLM Researcher about a given topic.

Every single <AI>pedia page on a topic will either default to median research-agent output (because the owner doesn't care to influence it), or be functionally equivalent to a AI-ghostwritten think piece because the owner cared enough to spin up a whole new wiki for it. In practice, a lot of owner-doesn't-care articles will be polluted by their prompt fiddling in chaotic ways that help nobody.

See https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe... and https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

Having said that I agree that Wikipedia is a tremendous achievement, and despite the wards it's amazing that it works as well as it does.

If you permit me to go on a tangent: Wikipedia is also interesting as a test case for our definitions of (economic) 'productivity'. By any common sense notion of productivity, Wikipedia was and is an enormous triumph: the wiki models harvests volunteers' time and delivers a high quality encyclopedia for free to customers. By textbook definitions, Wikipedia tanked productivity in the encyclopedia sector because these definitions essentially put revenue in the numerator and various measures of resources expended in the denominator---and Wikipedia's numerator is approximately zero dollars.

There have been many editing scandals over the years. While one could argue that editing cabals being caught and banned demonstrates that Wikipedia has structural resistance to such behavior, the scandals that become public are, almost by definition, the ones that were clumsy enough to get caught. The mechanisms that appear robust largely work only against amateurish, poorly hidden or commercially indiscreet operations. What they do not reliably detect are long-term, well-resourced, politically motivated or state-aligned editing groups that behave patiently, avoid obvious sockpuppeting footprints, and stay within procedural boundaries while still dominating page direction.

Why stop with him?

How could anyone trust him when there's something really important at stake?

For many people it's obvious Wikipedia has already so heavily poisoned the well that having a competitor come along can only create cleaner and purer water for the whole community.

Even though the point is valid.

That seems a bit paranoid. You worry that he US government will shut down Wikipedia and anything like it hosted anywhere in the world? Or alternatively block it when you’re in the US jurisdiction?

This is going to end lives. We cannot afford a plutocracy.

Is others' negative-reaction to this sort of thing actually unusual... or is "weird" a rationalization for "seeing them do that makes me unhappy in this instance"?

I think it's relatively normal (and positive) for people to be "hating on" something which is arguably unhelpful/lies/propaganda.

In isolation, Grokipedia is the vanity project of an unlikable billionare who wants to control narratives.

But I'd argue that there's more to it than just Musk. Zoom out a bit, and I think there's growing populist resentment against tech oligarchs from both sides of the aisle. People are sick and tired of the enshittification of the internet, social media, and anything with a screen. They also don't appreciate the idea of their jobs being replaced by AI when most people are already struggling to make ends meet.

So yeah, it's not just anger at the particulars of Grokipedia, people are just fed up with tech oligarchs in general. You could probably zoom out a little further and see similar resentment against of other wealthy elites for a myriad of other reaons, but suffice to say, Musk has good company among the ranks of other ghouls like Ellison, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Bezos, Andreessen and Nadella.

The roots of this tree are poisoned.

Now let's replace in this sentence the word Grokipedia with Wikipedia and ask the same question to Musk and to his followers: The need to hate on Wikipedia is weird to me. It's another site on the web.

funded by the wealthiest man in the world who is aggressively pushing his own personal agendas, willing to spend $$$$ to do so, and controls one of the most widely used social networks

so no, it's not "another site on the web"

Or, as an engineer, it offends me that someone would look at a lossy compression algorithm and choose the output as their ground truth.

It's still far better imo than Grok which is an explicitly biased project driven by Musk's personal issues with wikipedia and it's resistance in english to rightwing edit biasing. It's a suped up version of the old conservapedia project just with Grok driving the edits instead and it's being picked up in other LLMs as a citable source.

Any examples of sponsored editors? Google and the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_editing_inci... don't seem to have them

I know it's just wishful thinking, but I lowkey hope Grok to be the final winner of this race.

Since he's unable to "buy" wikipedia and slowly poison it in the same way he poisoned Twitter, we get to see Musk build a new propaganda machine fresh, using a far less subtle hand.

Will it work to further erode our shared reality and entrench the oligarchy? Well, people inexplicably still use X despite obviously understanding it's overwhelmed with propaganda, so there's a real risk that this will work too.