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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.
People consistently underestimate Musk. In particular his ability to pick a niche with apparent incumbents, say «that could be done better», bulldoze through cringe and come out on the other side with a product that redefines and expands the market. Sometimes he fails and abandons the effort. I think this could happen here, too. But not necessarily, nor even likely. He wants to do to Wikipedia what he did to Roskosmos and other legacy launch providers. He has emotional stake in this, he has the resources and allies for this, and he has the flow of Grok interactions on X to lean on. He can make it work.
There will be a Grok 5, and Grok 6, and they'll be vastly more powerful, not just as modern-day LLMs, they'll have continuous learning and strong multimodality. The main feature you need for good article generation is aggregating tens to hundreds of data points and deeply processing it, meaning context in the millions of tokens and probably weight updates or something functionally close; Grok will be there. Layout, flow etc. are easily solved if you apply work to it, it's trivial compared to general coding and we've come very far with coding LLMs (people who say they're terrible lack the sense of perspective, 2 years ago they were ≈unusable). Even if currently many higher-quality pages are handcrafted, that'll be useful data.
Judge this thing by its strong points, not by its slop and cringe.
Compare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd
https://grokipedia.com/page/George_Floyd
I only had to read 2 paragraphs before finding the AI made up some completely retarded fairy tale nonsense for absolutely no fucking reason. This is complete slop. Between 10% and 45% of the sentences in the entire article are completely fabricated, and you think this article is worth reading at all?
What the hell do you think is good about it?
Yeah and Floyd also graduated top of his class in the Navy Seals, and has over 300 confirmed kills.
From Wikipedia:
EDIT: Floyd was his mother's name not his father's, though. Took me a minute to spot that error. Understandable, but definitely not completely trustworthy.
He's also not the oldest sibling either. There are plenty of articles talking about Floyd's older siblings. So in fact this sentence half wrong. It got the place and date right, and everything else wrong.
But it just shows that the AI slop can't even get the most trivial basic uncontested facts right at all.
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