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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'm curious, since most/all of your complaints about Grokipedia seem to be about its current (in)ability to consistently produce useful text for an encyclopedia entry: if XAI, through some sort of engineering ingenuity, was able to improve Grokipedia, using only modern and plausible near-future AI tech (i.e. almost certainly something LLM-based), by the time it hits version 1.0, such that, any given text produced for an entry is provably at least as useful as the equivalent Wikipedia (or other reference of your choice) text, as measured by any and all metrics you personally find meaningful in this context, without reverting to fuzzy copy-paste or summarizing the existing Wiki (or other reference) text, would you see this endeavor by Elon as worthwhile?
If not, then what would Grokipedia have to accomplish, or what would its underlying technology have to be based on (or at least not be based on), for you to consider it to be a useful AI-based encyclopedia?
Sure, if Grokipedia can somehow be provably as-accurate as Wikipedia factually, then I think it would be something worthwhile. Right now it's in an entirely different universe - the fairytale universe.
Not sure what you mean by useful in this case.
I don't mean anything specific, merely the fact that any tool, like an encyclopedia, exists to be used for accomplishing some goal, and, as such, its value comes from its being useful. There are a trillion different metrics that can apply to any given case, but ultimately, it all comes down to, "Does the user find the tool useful for accomplishing the user's goals?"
Wikipedia has some level of usefulness, as determined by people who use it, including, presumably, yourself. My question was, if, according to whatever metric you personally use to determine if some encyclopedia is useful for the goals you want to accomplish, Grokipedia consistently (or possibly even strictly) outperformed Wikipedia, would you consider the project of Grokipedia to be worthwhile?
Your answer tells me Yes, that your criticism is based around the usefulness (lack thereof) of the text, rather than around how that text was produced. Which satisfies my curiosity.
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