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Elon Musk just launched Grokipedia, a kanged version of wikipedia run through a hideous AI sloppification filter. Of course the usual suspects are complaining about political bias and bias about Elon and whatnot, but they totally miss whole point. The entire thing is absolute worthless slop. Now I know that Wikipedia is pozzed by Soros and whatever, but fighting it with worthless gibberish isn't it.
As a way to test it, I wanted to check something that could be easily verifiable with primary sources, without needing actual wikipedia or specialized knowledge, so I figured I could check out the article of a short story. I picked the story "2BR02B" (no endorsement of the story or its themes) because it's extremely short and available online. And just a quick glance at the grokipedia article shows that it hallucinated a massive, enormous dump into the plot summary. Literally every other sentence in there is entirely fabricated, or even totally the opposite of what was written in the story. Now I don't know the exact internal workings of the AI, but it claims to read the references for "fact checking" and it links to the full text of the entire story. Which means that the AI had access to the entire text of the story yet still went full schizo mode anyways.
I chose that article because it was easily verifiable, and I encourage everyone to take a look at the story text and compare it to the AI "summary" to see how bad it is. And I'm no expert but my guess is that most of the articles are similarly schizo crap. And undoubtedly Elon fanboys are going to post screenshots of this shit all over the internet to the detriment of everyone with a brain. No idea what Elon is hoping to accomplish with this but I'm going to call him a huge dum dum for releasing this nonsense.
On the other hand, the admin of the Kiwi Farms says: "This article on the Kiwi Farms is perhaps the best and most neutral article I've seen on the Kiwi Farms." So perhaps more effort was expended on controversial topics.
He's probably mostly happy that the article isn't negative, which the Wikipedia article certainly is.
Notice that he didn't say that it's the most factual article about the farms, and in fact points out several hallucinations off hand. I would go as far to say that while the Wikipedia article is much more biased and negative, it almost certainly has fewer provable falsehoods in it.
Going over the initial blurb, Wikipedia is quite contentious but also hard to debunk:
The only thing to argue about is whether or not it facilitates harassment. Farmers would point out that calling for harassment is banned on site, but on the other hand it's likely a don't ask don't tell sort of situation where many farmers are actually harassing lolcows they just don't say so.
True, whether or not the farms are involved in the harassment. It might be arguable to call lolcows targets but it's not really wrong.
It is true that three lolcows have an heroed but it's impossible to prove whether or not any farmers were involved. It's extremely likely that farmers were involved, they just didn't admit to anything on the site.
Is there any evidence that harassment is occurring? Not only is it banned on site, farmers actively find, document and condemn anybody who organizes trolling plans against lolcows. Notably, the Reddit "snark" subs which seem to operate with impunity and, for example, have faced little consequences for mailing human skulls to H3H3. But I won't hold my breath to see if Wikipedia will ever mention that.
On what basis do you make this claim? The three you refer to killed themselves because:
You can read more about them in this OP (note that Byuu's entry is outdated and was written before the FOIA was released).
It's hard for me to see the Kiwi Farms as having contributed to their deaths in any way besides documenting and discussing them. However, discussion is not harassment.
Nice necro post, but also here are the facts:
These are facts that aren't specific to the farms and apply to pretty much every site on the Internet that allows discussion of lolcows (like Reddit). Putting harassment and Kiwi Farms in the same sentence is just darkly hinting at an unspecified implication between the two without explicitly stating a fact that could be disproven.
Where on reddit are lolcows discussed in depth?
They're called "snark" subreddits. Null has complained a few times about how they get away with harassment that would be immediately banworthy on Kiwi Farms.
Non-Null quote regarding H3H3's lawsuit against the moderators of that group's snark subreddit:
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"The media very rarely lies."
Incidentally, journalists love this sort of proxy for accuracy, as it is easy apply, but leaves totally aside attempting to determine the intended and actual affect the text has on the reader. One can use lies to tell the truth (a definition of art), or tell the truth to lie (propaganda).
cf.: Lying* like a lawyer, lying like a used car salesman.
Biased propaganda is more truthful than complete fairytale nonsense passed off as truth. I'll take the propaganda every day.
Of course AI is an algorithm and it can't intend anything but does it really matter when it's just plain wrong all the time?
I absolutely, unequivocally would not. I'd take stories of shamble-men when there are bandits or bears over targeted story selection (and novel definitions) about an unbiased algorithm.
One will lead to you avoiding a dangerous forest. The other will lead to you degrading the justice system.
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This is completely wrong. Fairytale nonsense is easier to correct. Lies of """truthful""" but biased propaganda have a stronger effect and correcting them requires attention spans longer than 5 seconds. Claiming AI hallucinations are worse is insane.
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