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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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billy99k[dead post] ◴[31 Oct 25 22:11 UTC] No.45777259[source]▶
[flagged]
the_gastropod ◴[31 Oct 25 22:26 UTC] No.45777367[source]▶
Please. What common conspiracy theories that have actual political impact have water carried by left-wing politicians?

Here's a short list of RW conspiracy theories with real life political consequences:

- Antivax conspiracies

- Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States ("birther" conspiracy)

- Biden / Ukraine conspiracy theory

- The litany of Covid-19 conspiracy theories

- The "deep state" conspiracy theory

- Sarah Palin's "death panels" conspiracy theory

- Sandy Hook was fake

- 2020 Election Fraud

- Trump / Ukraine conspiracy theory

- QAnon

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1. meowface ◴[31 Oct 25 23:07 UTC] No.45777702{3}[source]▶
By left-wing politicians, basically none (while right-wing conspiracy theories are now promoted by tons of right-wing politicians). Among non-politicians: while right-wingers are far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and the nature of the conspiracy theories they believe are far less tethered to reality on average, conspiracism is still a serious issue on the left.

It's like 50x less of an issue but I deal with so many left-wing conspiracies on a daily basis. I think the right is much worse than the left (on this topic and in general) but quite a lot of the left, or at least the populist left/populist far-left is, to me, its own particular sort of exhaustingly insufferability. I am proudly a left-liberal and not a centrist and never won't be, but I am still at a point where I can no longer tolerate a big sub-faction of the left. (Though I can't tolerate basically any of the right, minus a bit of the anti-Trump center-right.) I am going to lose my mind when I see vast numbers of leftists demand people not vote for the Democratic party presidential candidate in 2028.