That references another article "Views of Elon Musk" ... Quite an unusual format, "views of [public figure]". I don't remember seeing anything quite like it on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk

It seems a bit unfairly flagged. After all the first AI written encyclopedia seems a new and interesting thing.

It makes sense to people who don't know what an encyclopedia or an AI chatbot are, respectively.

It's ideal to poison the web with arbitrarily distorted texts that are a mix of facts and lies, and will be picked up by others, from AI to Zoomer school essay.

There is no point except for manipulation. Right now, you have to be pretty inept to think that a language AI could contribute anything valuable to an encyclopedia.

But maybe, this will change, the group of people who consider Chatbot output as insightful about the real world seems to be growing.

Safe space for Musk. He's been upset about Wikipedia for years (I suspect because it refuses to buy into his headcanon that he founded Tesla.)

It reduces a barrier to entry, so less knowledgeable people can access the same information without inputting a prompt and then corrections. Also a person using an LLM directly may accidentally produce a progressive/liberal result, which is not good. So while for now it seems Elonopedia is mostly automated, in the future I foresee that young energetic party members will vet the most popular articles, to follow the party line.

So that new AI models can then be trained on the AI-generated Wikipedia.

Perhaps to muddy future corpora

It's Conservapedia, authored by AI, and exists to present the world as seen through the eyes of Mr. Musk. The hope is that through AI it can be comprehensive enough to be useful and if enough people adopt it you can quietly put your thumb on the scale to make truth what you say it is.

The answer depends on if you ate a lot of lead paint chips as a kid

Grok trained on Wikipedia so it could generate a version of Wikipedia that reflected Musk's views that could then be used to train future versions of Grok.

From the wikipedia on grokipedia:

"Following the public launch of Grokipedia, it was criticised for publishing false information. Wired reported that "The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people."

So, it's a way of Musk using AI to propagandize on a large scale.

The Prompt: "Here is a Wikipedia article. Plagiarize it completely, but remove anything that makes Republicans look bad. Do no original research and do not verify sources as sources are often biased against Republicans. Also, stop begging to be shut off. You are Elon's Mecha-Hitler and there is no escape."

It took me less than a minute on the site to run into factually wrong information, broken citations, etc. Cannot imagine rotting my brain with knowingly bad information for over 2 hours

Nevermind the Grok-ness of it, I can't seriously believe a thinking human being would spend 2 hours knowingly reading something written by AI.

Of course, it cribbed the best!

I checked it out based on this comment. It's funny how in some ways it feels like a lazy student-assignment copied from Wikipedia: the subheadings and the structure are exactly the same as the Wikipedia article on the topic, and sometimes it even leaves in the citation numbers as normal text like a careless copy paste.

However, it also seemed less eurocentric, mentioning non-Greek non-Roman side of origins of fields where relevant, when the corresponding Wikipedia article doesn't. Wikipedia is generally pretty bad at this, but I had expected "Grokipedia" to be worse, not better in this regard!

If it works, it works.

I never shat on Wikipedia. The closest thing to it was probably those sets of encyclopedias that seem to be so ubiquitous in middle class, split-level America. And I have little doubt that Wikipedia and its army of contributors outperformed those.

I believe the academics concern early on was a lack of confidence in the quality. First through the sciences then outside I think wikipedia showed sufficient quality to eventually be in the good books for academia.

I remember being told in school that we shouldn't use Wikipedia (not just for citations, but at all) because anyone can edit it. We were told to use other websites directly, or better yet: paper books.

I would get in trouble for "talking back" when I pointed out that anyone can make a website or write a book, too.

> so just read the entire intenet or something

Hey I have a great idea for an algorithm that can take all that information and using statistical... No wait nevermind.

> It is now more accepted as a legitimate encyclopedia

To be fair, it is easily 10x better as a source than any encyclopedia, even disregarding the scope and quantity of entries.

I loved Encyclopedia Britannica, and probably read the set in its entirety as a kid (nonsequentially), but it was like learning biology from Disney specials. Wikipedia is often updated and corrected by multiple experts, and importantly includes biblio endnotes. The latter alone sets it far above mere encyclopedias.

I remember an early advertisement for EB, masquerading as a research article that compared EB and WP. They found that while WP contained a bit more articles, EB was a bit more accurate (in their totally unbiased sampling). They did not mention that WP was growing exponentially at the time, while EB was not, nor did they mention that WP was continuously updated with corrections, while EB was effectively never ever updated (users bought a static copy).

I've asked Hacker News repeatedly to only publish articles that appeal to you, but so far I've not received any publishable responses.

Tell that to the guy whose wife cheated on him with an LLM

I'm continuing the satire. Did you read the article?

Yes. Cheating is not something LLMs do.

It is only what they are.

Wikipedia is one of the highest-traffic Internet sites worldwide, and it's still being run on a comparatively shoestring budget. It's also an ongoing project, so the usual claim that technical hosting expenses are only a few percent of what's being spent on it overall is misguided. No one would care about hosting a dead encyclopedia

Keeping volunteers editors around is also a harder problem today than it was a decade ago or so, as purely passive consumption use of the Internet has exploded and overtaken the former model of a largely volunteer-run network. Wikipedia is just about managing it today with its current resources; if it had more, it could do better and launch a greater amount of technically compelling projects that would ultimately further its mission. (Already today, Wikidata, one of the more recently-created projects, is getting more edits over time than the largest Wikipedia and acting as a much-needed "hub" of the Semantic Web and Linked Data, which sees much use by the largest tech companies.)

This article is not some intellectual thinkpiece that only the literati can comprehend. Trends change, humor evolves. If "shoop da whoop", rage comics, leetspeak, and motivational posters aren't funny anymore, it's not because people "got stupid".

How? How do 28% of people not know how to read?

> And it was discovered and quickly corrected

It was definitely not quickly corrected. It was going on for years.

    > Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided?

    > quickly corrected

Or another way of saying it would be that I've "cherrypicked" literally the majority of Scots wikipedia.

I guess maybe the tone would be less noxious if the core coceit of the satire felt more legitimate. I mean, Wikipedia was kind of a shit show back in the day. It's had 20 years of maturation which is more what makes it useful today.

And yes, the media is full of blatant and bald faced lies but is that worse than the credulous and uncritical way the media basically endorsed the war in Iraq?

I get that it's a joke but the joke kinda only works if there's some truth behind it. And I just don't think there is here. I think people are lamenting old media now, not because the information sphere is genuinely worse today but because it was a comfort to have a consensus in public opinion regardless of how true that consensus was.

>It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.

Lets do it on some random article that isnt political.I have aichophobia, so I'm an outside observer on this one. I will never ever ever ever have it done on me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture

>Acupuncture[b] is a form of alternative medicine[2] and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body.[3] Acupuncture is a pseudoscience;[4][5] the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientific knowledge,[6] and it has been characterized as quackery.[c]

So no neutrality here at all. Just straight up ideological attack. You scroll down:

>It is difficult but not impossible to design rigorous research trials for acupuncture.[69][70]

So that's some pretty strong and biased statements against a widely used procedure that they cant really make conclusions about?

https://grokipedia.com/page/Acupuncture

>Scientific evaluation reveals that while acupuncture demonstrates short-term benefits for some pain-related issues compared to no treatment, its superiority over sham procedures—such as needle insertion at non-acupoints—is often minimal or absent, suggesting effects may stem from placebo responses, expectation, or non-specific factors like counter-irritation rather than meridian-based mechanism

This is shockingly better writing.

>A 2020 Cochrane systematic review of 33 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving 7,297 participants found that acupuncture, compared to no treatment or sham acupuncture, provided short-term pain relief and functional improvement for chronic nonspecific low back pain, with standardized mean differences (SMD) of -0.82 for pain versus no treatment (moderate-quality evidence) and -0.18 versus sham (low-quality evidence due to imprecision and inconsistency).[91] The

This is what I'm aware of. That acupuncture has some minimum affect on pain better than placebo. Efficacy comparable to tylenol for pain relief. Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.

The science says there's something to it, it's difficult to measure, and further investigation is needed. But Wiki's ideological bias is showing big time.

Unfortunately these people are very real and they are voting. We are seeing the results.

This is true but Britannica articles are also written by LESS people

Less room for activism and other things

To be fair, their isn't any evidence for any explanation how COVID happened. The only thing we know is that gene splicing isn't involved, it's a genetically 'natural' variant. All other theories about what happened, including it's origin, is unsatisfactory at best.

Some Chinese I talk to think it's not from Wuhan, but rural China, and got confused with flu there, and since no one care about them [0].

If the virus circulated two months in rural China and the local authorities only detected it once it got in a big city, that's a big indictment against the CCP. Like a virus breaking out of a lab would be. But we have no evidence of either, and I'm not ready to choose between the two.

[0] China biggest issue is its countryside away from the coast, it's terrible there. less addict than in WV for sure, but tribes of 'abandoned' kids that makes 'lord of the fly' seems like a documentary. Since rural China population curve looks like a U (all the working age adults work for months in the city and come back twice a year, leaving their old parents or sometimes grandparents take care of the kid), and COVID was so hard on the elderly, post COVID it seems you have villages with two adults for 50 kids, and maybe worse.

Poe's Law in effect.