Tim Bray on Grokipedia

I checked a topic I care about, and that I have personally researched because the publicly available information is pretty bad.

The article is even worse than the one on Wikipedia. It follows the same structure but fails to tell a coherent story. It references random people on Reddit (!) that don't even support the point it's trying to make. Not that the information on Reddit is particularly good to begin with, even it it were properly interpreted. It cites Forbes articles parroting pretty insane and unsubstantiated claims, I thought mainstream media was not to be trusted?

In the end it's longer, written in a weird style, and doesn't really bring any value. Asking Grok about about the same topic and instructing it to be succinct yields much better results.

It was just launched? I remember when Wikipedia was pretty useless early on. The concept of using an LLM to take a ton of information and distill it down into encyclopedia form seems promising with iteration and refinement. If they add in an editor step to clean things up, that would likely help a lot (not sure if maybe they already do this)

Nothing about that seems promising! The one single thing you want from an Encyclopedia is compressing factual information into high-density overviews. You need to be able to trust the article to be faithful to its sources. Wikipedia mods are super anal about that, and for good reason! Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? You can never trust it to be faithful with the sources. On Wikipedia, at least there’s lots of people checking on each other. There are no such guardrails for an LLM. 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.

If there ever was a tool suited just perfectly for mass manipulation, it’s an LLM-written collection of all human knowledge, controlled by a clever, cynical, and misanthropic asshole with a god complex.

> Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? You can never trust it to be faithful with the sources.

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