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Tim Bray on Grokipedia

(www.tbray.org)
175 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 31 Oct 25 21:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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tptacek ◴[31 Oct 25 21:53 UTC] No.45777117[source]▶
Why give it oxygen?
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meowface ◴[31 Oct 25 21:59 UTC] No.45777160[source]▶
To play devil's advocate: Grok has historically actually been one of the biggest debunkers of right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories on Twitter, contrary to popular conception. Elon keeps trying to tweak its system prompt to make it less effective at that, but Grokipedia was worth an initial look from me out of curiosity. It took me 10 seconds to realize it was ideologically-motivated garbage and significantly more right-biased than Wikipedia is left-biased.

(Unfortunately, Reply-Grok may have been successfully partially lobotomized for the long term, now. At the time of writing, if you ask grok.com about the 2020 election it says Biden won and Trump's fraud claims are not substantiated and have no merit. If you @grok in a tweet it now says Trump's claims of fraud have significant merit, when previously it did not. Over the past few days I've seen it place way too much charity in right-wing framings in other instances, as well.)

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pstuart ◴[31 Oct 25 22:08 UTC] No.45777225[source]▶
The problem of debunking right-wing misinformation is that it doesn't seem to matter. The consumers of that misinformation want it and those of us who think it's bad for society already know that its garbage.

It feels like we've reached Peak Stupidity but it's clear it can (and likely will) get much worse with AI videos.

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1. meowface ◴[31 Oct 25 22:51 UTC] No.45777581[source]▶
On one hand, yes, you're completely right.* On the other hand, there is an obligation for something or someone to do the job of pointing out the info is wrong, and how and why. Even if it makes most of them believe it even more strongly afterwards, it's still worse for it to go constantly unchallenged and for believers to never even come across the opposition.

*(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.)