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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.
This reminds me of Vox Day's Encyclopedia Galactica project, or the even more retarded Conservapedia.
Wikipedia and crowd-sourced intelligence in general has its obvious failure modes, yet Wikipedia remains an extremely valuable source for.... most things that aren't heavily politicized. Even the latter will usually have articles that are factually correct if also heavily factually curated.
The problem with AI-generated "slop" is not the "schizo" hallucinations that you see. It's the very reasonable and plausible hallucinations that you don't see. It's the "deceptive fluency" of an LLM that is usually right but, when it's wrong, will be confidently and convincingly wrong in a way that someone who doesn't know better can't obviously spot.
With Wikipedia, if I read an article on Abraham Lincoln, I am pretty confident the dates will be correct and the life and political events will be real and sourced. Sure, sometimes there are errors and there are occasional trolls and saboteurs (I once found an article on a species of water snake that said their chief diet was mermaids), and if you are a Confederate apologist you will probably be annoyed at the glazing, but you still won't find anything that would be contradicted by an actual biography.
Whereas with an AI-generated bio of Lincoln, I would expect that it's 90% real and accurate but randomly contaminated with mermaids.
So, yes, I'm sure most of us are aware that Wikipedia political articles are going to be as misleading as they can get away with, but let me just say that there are some completely non-political articles that are factually wrong, too. If you look up the Sleeping Beauty problem, the article states that there is "ongoing debate", which is ridiculous. For actual mathematicians, there's no debate; the answer is simple. The only reason there's a "debate" is because some people don't quite understand what probability measures. Imagine if the Flat Earth page said that there was "ongoing debate" on the validity of the theory...
And don't even get me started on the Doomsday argument, which is just as badly formed but has a bunch of advocates who are happy to maintain a 20-page article full of philosobabble to make it sound worthy of consideration.
I'm sure there are many other examples from fields where I'm not informed enough to smell the bullshit. Crowdsourcing knowledge has more failure modes than just the well-known political one.
I just want to say, given all the talk about the Sleeping Beauty Problem here, I think the ~10 year old video game Zero Time Dilemma, which is where I learned of it, might be up the alleys of many people here. It's the 3rd game in a series, with the 2nd one, Virtue's Last Reward, being focused around the prisoner's dilemma. All 3 are escape-room games with anime-style art and voiced visual novel cut scenes, with the scenarios being Saw-ish where characters awaken trapped in a death game.
I actually loved the Zero Escape series - except Zero Time Dilemma, sadly, which I bounced on because I really didn't care for the graphics and the nonlinear format. Sounds like I should go back to finish it, though.
Zero Time Dilemma is certainly the weakest of the 3, and it's not close. And I didn't even find most of the scifi/philosophizing to be interesting in 999, especially compared to ZTD. Yet the characters, presentation, and gameplay all were far better in the former (and better still in VLR IMHO), to the extent that I'd say 999 is by far the better game. So I'd say you're not missing out on a whole lot.
I have the vague recollection that the only coherent interpretation of the final explanation of 999 is that the villain did everything due to a misunderstanding of the rules/universe the game operates in, which was amusing but narratively unsatisfying and inspired a couple of irl rants.
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