However it's still 0.1, we'll see what the v1 will look like.

And a lot of us would be better off releasing our dumb ideas too. The world has a lot of issues and if all you do is talk down and don't try to fix anything yourself. Maybe it's time to get off the web a little and do something else.

Given his later attitude when it came to careful thought, I'm no longer under the impression that these earlier expositions were his ideas at all. I suspect he got it from the engineers and used it to burnish his image. I know that certain companies, e.g Apple, Dyson, etc have a culture of "all ideas came from the big man at the top, no matter who thought of it."

I actually think that it's funnier if it was an emergent behavior as opposed to a deliberate decision. And it fits my mental model of how weird LLMs are, so I think unintentional really is the more likely explanation.

You just described Wikipedia early on before it had much content, rules around weasel words, original research, etc

That's in contrast to other topics, the nuances of which even seasoned experts could disagree about. Any discussion on that could devolve into the nuances of the topic rather than Grokipedia itself. But it's fair to assume the topmost expert on Tim Bray is Tim Bray, so we should be getting a pretty unbiased review.

As such it could be a useful insight into how Grok and Grokipedia and its owners operate.

That's kind of been my impression too. Not that it's terribly biased or anything but just rather boring to read.

No? How do you learn stuff you don't know? Are you really telling me you enroll in a graduate course or buy a textbook for everyone one?

Like, can you give an example of a "deep dive" research project of yours that does not begin with an encyclopedia-style treatment? And then, maybe, check the Wikipedia page to see if it's actually worse than whatever you picked?

Again, true domain experts are going to read domain journals and consult their peers in the domain for access to deep information.[1] But until you get there, you need somewhere you can go that you know is a good starting point. And arguments that that place is somehow not https://wikipedia.org/ seem... well, strained beyond credibility.

[1] Though even then domains are really broad these days and people tend to use Wikipedia even for their day jobs. Lord knows I do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk#Assassination

https://grokipedia.com/page/Charlie_Kirk : Assassination Details and Investigation

This is an active case that has not gone to trial, and the alleged text messages and Discords have not had their forensics cross-examined. Yet Grokipedia is already citing them as fact, not allegation. (What is considered the correct neutral way to report on alleged facts in active cases?)

With these sources in hand I think I am convinced of Tim's original point; I first looked at that ftc document and didn't see anything about user responsiveness in it.

The fact that it's not mentioned and that the main points he made in that summary have nothing to do with user responsiveness is evidence that Grok did a crap job summarizing his role in the FTC's cas, right?

Yes, nothing about this is “there yet” which was my point

> Having an editor is totally infeasible, at that point you might as well have the humans write the articles.

Why?

"Biggest" is tough to quantify, but "most significant" and "most effective" is what I meant. I use Twitter way too many hours a day basically every day and have a morbid fixation on diving deep into right and far-right rabbit holes there. (Like, on thousands of occasions.)

Grok is without a doubt the single most important contributor to convincing believers of right-wing conspiracy theories that maybe the theories aren't as sound as they thought. I have seen this play out hundreds of times. Grok often serves as a kind of referee or tiebreaker in threads between right-wing conspiracy theorists and debunkers, and it typically sides overwhelmingly with the debunkers. (Or at least used to.) And it does it in a way that validates the conspiracy theorist's feelings, so it's less likely to trigger a psychological immune system response.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GROKvsMAGA/ contains some examples. These may seem cherry-picked, but they generally aren't. (Might need to look at some older posts now that Elon has put increasingly pressure on the Grok and Grokipedia developers to keep it """anti-woke""".)

When a right-wing conspiracy theorist sees some liberal or leftist call them out for their falsehoods, they respond with insults or otherwise dismiss or ignore it. When daddy Elon's Grok tells them - politely - that what they believe is complete horseshit, they react differently. They often respond to it 3 - 20 times, poking and prodding. Of course, most still come away from it convinced Grok is just compromised by the wokes/Jews/whatever. But some seem to actually eventually accept that, at the least, maybe they got some details wrong. It's a very fascinating sight. I almost never see that reaction when they argue with human interlocutors.

To be clear, it was never perfect. For example, if you word things in just the right way and ask leading questions, then like with any LLM (especially one that needs to respond in under 280 characters) you can often eventually coax it into saying something close to what you want. I have just seen many instances where it cuts through bullshit in a way that a leftist arguing with a Nazi can't really do.

No shit; it's always been that way since mass media became a thing. Besides, there is no such thing as quality conservative and/or "anti-woke" media. The very concept represents a contradictio in adiecto. And Elon's just the modern version of an industrialist of yesteryear. Back in the day they owned the mass media of their time: radio and television. Today its "AI"-enshittified parasocial media and ideally the infrastructure that runs those dumps.

> "Don't forget that public opinion and the media landscape are quite different in 2025 from what they were in the 2010s when most prior studies on WP bias have been written."

Bias studies have been written since Wikipedia became a staple in hoi polloi's info diet. And there's always been a whole cottage industry of pathological and practised liars (e. g. the Heritage Foundation, amongst others) catering to right-wing grievance issues. The marked difference is that the right's attacks against Wikipedia as an institution are more aggressive since Trump... completely in line with the more aggressive attacks on human rights, reason, science, and democratic institutions on part of conservatives world wide.

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.

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 be mitigated?

> You would need to trust a single publisher with a technology that’s allowing them to crank out millions of entries and updates permanently, so fast that you could never detect subtle changes or errors or biases targeted in a specific way—and that doesn’t even account for most people, who never even bother to question an article, let alone check the sources.

How is this different from Wikipedia already? It seems that if the frequency of additions/changes is really a problem, you can slow this down. Wikipedia doesn’t just automatically let every edit take place without bots and humans reviewing changes

It’s painful to watch how many people (a critical mass) don’t understand this — and how dangerous it is. When you combine that potential, if not likely, outcome with the fact that people are trained or manipulated into an “us vs. them” way of thinking, any sensible discussion point that lies somewhere in between, or any perspective that isn’t “I’m cheering for my own team no matter what,” gets absorbed into that same destructive thought process and style of discourse.

In the end, this leads nowhere — which is extremely dangerous. It creates nothing but “useful idiot”–style implicit compliance, hidden behind a self-perceived sense of “deep thinking” or “seeing the truth that the idiots on the other side just don’t get.” That mindset is the perfect mechanism — one that feeds the perfect enemy: the human ego — to make followers obey and keep following “leaders” who are merely pushing their own interests and agendas, even as people inflict damage on themselves.

This dynamic ties into other psychological mechanisms beyond the ego trap (e.g., the sunk cost fallacy), easily keeping people stuck indefinitely on the same self-destructive path — endangering societies and the future itself.

Maybe, eventually, humanity will figure out how to deal with this — with the overwhelming information overload, the rise of efficient bots, and other powerful, scalable manipulation tools now available to both good and bad actors across governments and the private sector. We are built for survival — but that doesn’t make the situation any less concerning.

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.

Most people who believe bullshit were convinced by something. It might not have been fully rational but there is usually a kernel of something there that triggered that belief. They also probably have heard at least the surface level version of the oppising argument at some point before. Too many debunkers just reiterate the surface argument without engaging with whatever is convincing their opponent. Then when it doesn't land they complain their opponent is brainwashed. Which sometimes might even be true, but sometimes their argument just misses the point of why their opponent believes what they do.

*(The same is true of left-wing conspiracy theories. It's silly to pretend that right-wing conspiracy theorists aren't far more common and don't believe in, on average, far more delusional and obviously false conspiracy theories than left-wingers do, but it's important not to forget they exist. I have dealt with some. They're arguably worse in some ways since they tend to be more intelligent, and so are more able to come up with more plausible rationalizations to contort their minds into pretzels.)

The problem with nihilism is that it’s wrong.

I don't know what "Cult of Personality" you are referring to; unless you are hallucinating this particular reference, I've gone to school in the wrong country for that particular report to be part of my assigned reading (and the right country, sadly, seems to have skipped it entirely; there might be an update out in a few years...). Either way, what is the relevance here? What I've been saying is that I'm far from sure of this project's success and would be doing it quite differently. Musk's personal characteristics may well be the reason why he did it the way he did, but ultimately the project won't live and die by them (already because he himself will likely lose interest soon enough).

There's a big difference between listening to other perspectives and inventing other perspectives.

Why not let the believers of other perspectives argue for those perspectives? Wouldn't they be the best advocates? And if nobody believes the perspective you've invented, then perhaps it wasn't worth discussing after all.

Again, we're not really lacking in volume of commenters here.

I'm yet to see conservatives bring up a single subject that Wikipedia allegedly silences out of ideology, that is not an obviously false conspiracy theory. In this, Wikipedia may appear to have a left-wing bias, but only because the modern right has gotten so divorced from reality that not relaying their propaganda feels like bias against them.

There's a potential for dishonesty, but lack of honesty can also mean just opacity or reticence. Either way, openness and honesty are superior.

I do think that sometimes people say "devil's advocate" when it's their own opinion but an "unpopular" opinion that they may be embarrassed to admit, so they hide behind the devil, pretending they're not the devil themselves.

> "Devil's advocate" is a common enough term, whats the big deal? Is it the word "devil"? Do you think someone is calling you Satan?

No. The issue is not the term. A different term would not help. But the term is instructive about its own usage. In the Catholic Church, nobody wanted to argue against a potential saint, so someone had to be specifically appointed by the Church to argue the other side, a position the arguer didn't necessarily believe. The problem with devil's advocates online is that they're self-appointed for some reason, despite the fact that usually there are already people who sincerely believe that opinion and would argue for it, without the need for a devil's advocate. The Catholic Church canonization process is completely different from online arguments, and there's no need for the special role of the devil's advocate.