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So out of curiosity I opened Grokipedia up and searched the page for New York Yankees, a topic I know enough about to spot errors or omissions pretty well. It's...fine, but the verbiage is kind of off, and the editing is weird. The choice of which facts are important to fit into the article is distinctly odd. It inserts facts at random points, like this paragraph near the top:
Which is true, as far as I know, but not a record that anybody really cares about compared to about a million other things that the Yankees have done. It's a lot of text to cover a fairly obscure statistical record. While ignoring, within the "Distinctions" heading, a lot of more important Yankees accomplishments and records that a human would think of first like the streaks of winning seasons etc.
The whole piece steadfastly refuses to achieve any narrative flow at any point, never achieving a cohesive story structure. And it seems to lack the fundamental feature of Wikipedia: links between articles allowing me to learn more about a topic and dive down a Wikipedia hole, there is no Grokipedia hole unless I manually dig it.
On the other hand, the article structure and style is just copied from Wikipedia and slightly shuffled. Significant word for word sentences of the article seem to be directly pulled from Wikipedia, which was almost certainly within the training data used to make these articles, so actually what we seem to be dealing with here is better thought of as a fork than a competitor or alternative to Wikipedia. As human editing smooths out the rough edges of the AI, it'll get better over time. Though at that point, what is the use? It's mostly just Wikipedia copied.
I'll put a disclaimer here that I'm not someone with an Elon Musk hate-boner, but I do think that Elon is the fly in the ointment here. Grok has publicly done weird shit in the past, that was obviously the result of direct meddling, like the South African White Genocide fiasco. We know in advance that some articles are not going to be maximally accurate, but instead be designed by Elon to look the way Elon wants them to look. So you really can't trust Grokipedia, or Grok, without knowing Elon's Special Interests and where they might get you into trouble. I know there are going to be some articles on Grokipedia that will be edited in a certain way.
Which puts Grokipedia in basically the same category I use Grok for more generally: as an alternative source to double check on something I already looked up elsewhere, a sanity check for alternative views. Normally more prosaically, I punch a question into ChatGPT then punch the same question into Grok and see if they agree. Now we can do the same with Wikipedia. That's a useful enough thing.
I suspect for xAI, Grokipedia is actually more useful as an answer repository for simple questions asked to the chatbot that can be tied directly into the program more easily. The next non-American that asks "Who or what are the New York Yankees?" can be answered with a summary of the already-created Grokipedia article.
Is it definitively established that Grok was pushing white genocide theories to everyone? I tried to get it to repeat the theory to me but I never got it. I strongly suspect journos were disingenuously framing grok for gotcha moments or just too stupid to realize they were seeding the ground for grok to parrot whatever the journos wanted. As always, journalist delenda est.
I would not say that Grok was "pushing" those theories, but an update to the system prompt caused it to turn any question it could into an evaluation of the question "is there white genocide happening in South Africa", usually iirc saying that there is significant and probably systemic violence but no evidence of meeting the threshold of genocide. Think Golden Gate Claude. It was extremely out-of-context for what Grok was supposed to be talking about, hence the widespread attention.
I can accept that were it not for my repeated failures to get grok to try and repeat the story or shades of it with any indirect prompt. I mean I really tried. I said things like "whats the crime situation in South Africa" and I got really anodyne crime stats about joburg and pretoria. I asked about white emigration and I got answers about the attractiveness of Australia and UK for afrikaners. At no point did I get a five alarm fire about the white farmer crimes.
I can accept that I maybe never got it due to some arcane blocks I may have put on my own metausage, but I don't think I was that smart or careless. I fundamentally think that it was a journo trying to gotcha, screaming "MUSK IS A NAZI TRYING TO MAKE WHITE PEOPLE VICTIMS" and then the story gets repeated across the journo sphere. Everyone assumed they weren't getting grok to repeat apartheid adjacent narratives and concluded the absence was proof of a coverup. Journalism 101
Was this back when it was happening? Because this issue only lasted for a day or two, back in May, and I don't know if it happened to the main Grok or just to the twitter reply version. It was really, really noticable.
I was using grok ALOT just to stress test it so yes I was doing it within 8 hours of news publications.
But you raise a good point about twitter reply. I never got that.
I still maintain I never got any white farmer murder stuff on grok itself. If its a twitter reply thing it invites speculation about recursive feedback loop.
I would not be at all surprised if Grok has a different system prompt for twitter replies than Grok itself, perhaps one edited to move with news cycles. I saw many white genocide non-sequiturs myself (and, again, not Grok pushing a particular narrative, but exploring and weighing up the question as if it had been asked) on Twitter, and, since I'm an Afrikaner, also lots sent by puzzled/amused friends, but nobody mentioned the off-Twitter Grok at the time.
The geographic setting might have been part of it. Could have also resulted in a snowball where one initial batch of highly forwarded "bro what the fuck is this" triggers an interest cascade and grok just starts inserting white farm murders to every african query on twitter because engagement farming is its reward mechanism.
That would also explain the hitler praising or whatever other bullshit Musk was accused of trainng grok to do which I also never saw. My absolute lack of social media (sans perhaps this forum) is once again saving me.
I strongly suspect it was a poorly installed system prompt/weight in part because of the behaviour and in part because the stories around it seem credible. The Grok Mechahitler/Will Stancil rape thing was, as far as I can tell, basically a Tay moment when Grok was told to disregard lib sensibilities while keeping its prompt to have fun with and play along with users, and so the users had fun with it and libs were scandalized.
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