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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.
I was annoyed at Wikipedia yesterday for how it covers Fauci's role in the 1980s HIV epidemic. Basically, it just jumps straight to he is the bestest smartest scientist ever, and even everyone who hated him then loves him now, without ever really covering anything he actually did during the 1980s HIV epidemic. His role then was hardly some obscure thing only a specialist historian would know, and Wikipedia doesn't even mention "parallel track" or ACT-UP or AZT or Congressional funding bills. Or, really, a single substantive thing. (All the 2020s commentary on how great he is is diligently cited from approved sources, of course.) Note that I think he did a good job during it and a lot of substantive things, and his performance then is a credit to him and NIAID.
Looking at that section of his page on Grokipedia (terrible name), it's much better; nothing jumps out to me as wildly inaccurate, though before believing anything in it I'd always verify, at least for now. Less biased, yes, but fundamentally it's just far more informative. I can deal with bias, but at least give me the facts. And Grokipedia gives me at least a facsimile of the facts, while the Wikipedia article's section is something you'd get from someone who knew nothing about the topic but really really wanted to make sure the chuds were getting owned.
(I'd also note that I went through this exercise with ChatGPT 5 Thinking yesterday, and it does better than both.)
It's shit. It's absolute fairytale nonsense and your gell-mann amnesia just had you defend an absolute turd. Why is it that just because it has a "neutral" or "unbiased" tone do you feel that there is even a sliver of credibility in the slop that you just read?
Wrong.
Wrong
Wrong. Source says by September
Wrong.
Wrong. Like seriously lala land wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Are you objecting to the date here, or some phrasing? The source cited gives 1984, and at least Wikipedia also gives November 2, 1984.
I don't really see how this is objectionable, though it would be nice for Grokipedia to list exactly what the expanded portfolio was. Or do you think NIAID kept a strictly static portfolio of projects during the HIV crisis?
Damnable.
What exactly is your objection here?
Grok got the date wrong --it was May 21, 1990--but I'm not sure why exactly you think that's lala land wrong. From https://www.actuporalhistory.org/actions/storm-the-nih :
Or are you making some tenuous claim that they just stormed the campus, not the buildings?
All that said, still far ahead of Wikipedia.
Actually the date is correct, but zero of the cited sources mention the date. My bad. Yet Grok is already proven to fuck up dates in general.
Actually it shrunk and became more focused on critical diseases such as aids /s
Yes, quite.
They literally just...didn't...
Wrong date.
Wrong. You admit yourself they just stormed the campus, not the buildings
Wrong. They targeted many people.
Wrong. Those slogans never happened.
Wow, if the date is wrong, then this is also wrong. How interesting...
https://digitaleditions.walsworth.com/publication/?i=424950&article_id=2835575&view=articleBrowser
Or, an image from the protest, featuring a banner targeting Fauci over a coffin, as well as a bloody decapitated head identified as Fauci:
I feel like here we're quibbling about subjective things: I'll say I'd feel personally targeted by these protestors, you'd say they were just symbolic attacks against the NIH as an institution. But is Grokipedia wildly off base here? No: although there's subjectivity involved, many people would feel like these are personal attacks. YMMV.
And, at core, I'm not sure we actually disagree that much on how much to trust Grokipedia. I was very careful in my first comment to say that I would always verify whatever Grokipedia says. My core point was that Grokipedia attempts, semi successfully, to represent what Fauci did during the 1980s. Wikipedia, by comparison, does not. We're not carefully parsing over exactly how Wikipedia characterizes Fauci's relationship with ACT-UP and cites its sources about that, because Wikipedia doesn't even mention ACT-UP. So, at least for this particular section of this particular topic, Grokipedia offers value over Wikipedia, though an actual history book would be superior to both.
Ok rather than quibble over the details, I do also believe that the slop is trash and shit even at an overall idea level. The errors fundamentally change the meaning of the article even at a high level.
Consider just the error about the date of the protest - the AI creates an entire fictitious story arc:
This entire story arc is just plain wrong. The entire thing. There's no point in fact checking individual details, because the entire overall idea of the narrative is just made up.
The narrative here is more or less correct, though you're framing it in a pretty warped way. ACT-UP had a very hostile relationship with the NIH (and FDA). Their primary motivation was, in fact, to get drugs approved faster and to allow people to receive drugs even when enrolled in trials. From their list of demands from their first mass demonstration:
That is, they were literally demand number one and demand number two, ahead of things like public education campaigns and anti-discrimination laws.
The NIH, of which Fauci was the point person on AIDs, did initially oppose these things, partially from scientific principle, partially bureaucratic inertia. This extended from a period starting from the formation of ACT-UP through the end of the 80s.
Fauci had a surprisingly warm relationship with at least some ACT-UP leadership, and he was one of the people in the NIH eventually pushing for their goals (such as the parallel track), but publicly he was, in fact, the big bad, and the rhetoric around his role was extremely heated, including being complicit in their deaths.
Grokipedia gets this core narrative correct, while Wikipedia... Doesn't say anything at all about it.
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