Grokipedia and the coup against reality itself

I got the impression Grokipedia (what a lousy name, BTW; there's not a teenage rock band that would call itself that) has been trained on Wikipedia. I compared the entries for "Gallium Arsenide", and Grok's first sections is a copy of Wikipedia, with a an editor-like comment on top:

    Gallium arsenide

    Except where otherwise noted, data are given for materials in their standard state (at 25 °C [77 °F], 100 kPa). verify (what is Y N ?)

    Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V direct band gap semiconductor with a zinc blende crystal structure. Gallium arsenide is used in the manufacture of devices such as microwave frequency integrated circuits, monolithic microwave integrated circuits, infrared light-emitting diodes, laser diodes, solar cells and optical windows.[6] GaAs is often used as a substrate material for the epitaxial growth of other III-V semiconductors, including indium gallium arsenide, aluminum gallium arsenide and others.

Makes me think Grok is also parsing the history and selectively leaving out edits in order to produce a result with the "correct" bias.

This reminds me of a joke website I pondered making a few years ago 'provemeright.com'. If you are in a bar and you make an outrageous claim and don't want to back down, provemeright.com has your back! Give us 10 min and we will edit wikipedia and create a website with your 'fact' on it!... It was a funny joke when it wasn't real.

Arguably the purpose of this site isn't to serve the public or to compile knowledge (it's not user editable at all from what I can see).

The point is to get this thing crawled and given weight by LLMs in order to poison them and bias them in the direction Musk wants: debunked race science, anti-transgender, etc etc.

Why don’t people just ignore Musk?

Musk was never the sharpest tool in the box, and he used to regularly make a fool of himself to his employees by trying to pass himself off as an engineer like Silicon Valley's most annoying suit, but ever since he started falling for the dumbest conspiracy theories, he's been really dedicated (and to his credit, he knows how to be dedicated, though not for long) to making stupidity an intellectual ideal.

It's amazing to see such deep insecurities (in Musk's case, that he's not as smart as the people around him) played out so publicly and by such successful people. Instead of going to therapy, they spend fortunes trying to construct a world that would justify their self-perception. Maybe if an encyclopedia said he was right, Musk could finally feel smart.

Wouldn't it make sense to have these wikipedias created by different llms, and compare them to expose their biases?

Related:

Grokipedia by xAI has just launched with 885,279 articles

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459

The gap widens. If you're discussing something online, and someone drops a Grok link as evidence or reference material, how are you supposed to continue at that point? You can't convince someone who lives in an alternate reality of anything by argument. I think I would just stop relying. Most people would. It's not a new problem, but that wall keeps growing.

Reality has a well known liberal bias

winners write history, and Elon is clearly willing to do whatever it takes to put himself at the forefront, even if it means sacrificing humanity future.

It's a classic case of delusions of grandeur, his story will be told, but not in the way he hopes. We just need to tank few more shit years I guess.

Leaving culture war articles aside, I think having on other subjects, a diversity of perspectives is legitimate. Consider a personal interest of mine, the dark ages in Europe after the fall of the western Roman empire.

The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)) is a one-sided presentation that begins with denying the historical reality of a period called "the dark ages", continues with a history of the term itself, and concludes with a brief section on non-academic use of the term and reiterates the claim that the periodization is a "myth of popular culture". The article barely mentions the events of the period.

If you read the Grokipedia article on the same subject (https://grokipedia.com/page/Dark_Ages_(historiography)), you'll find not only meta-discussion of the origins of the term, but also in-depth exploration of the events of the period, the causes of the decline in living standards, and arguments from prominent scholars on both sides of the debate about the utility of labeling this period a "dark age".

The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Ward-Perkins, a prominent scholar in the camp arguing that the dark ages represented real material decline. The Grokipedia article cites him extensively.

The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.

Yet the Wikipedia article is one-sided because, frankly, its editors see themselves as enforcers of academic orthodoxy.

There are thousands of disputed subjects like this outside the culture war everyone gets worked up about. It really is the case that Wikipedia presents one side of live academic conflicts and gatekeeps sources to minimize heterodox perspectives -- again, all having nothing to do with mechahitler or the culture war or whatever.

I'm glad there's more epistemic competition in the world now.

2018 has a lovely progression of articles 'are we living in ___&'s world now', that went from George Orwell to Aldous Huxley to finally Philip K Dick (PKD).

And Henry Farrell nailed it with the PKD article. Dick was obsessed with fake humans, with reality being taken over by all manner of camouflaged invader or alternate reality weirdo coming in and co-opting our reality away from us. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/henry-farrell-philip-k...

It's a glorious article. And it's totally the sicko shit happening right here. Grokipedia will almost certainly never hold itself to any real standards, will source (if they source at all) the most absurd ridiculous reality window shopped bottom of the barrel garbage, from horrendous sources. Stealing Wikipedia then probably using AI to rewrite a quarter of it to some bias seems absurdly likely.

"Reality shopping on the internet" has become such a major major effort. And Grokipedia is striving to become exactly such an appealing reality, a bespoke weird racist meanspirited place that confirms the invading forces reality against can do human spirit and hope and inclusion and possibility.

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans does so much to capture what is alas so much defining aspects of our time: the slide away from consensual believable reality and into the rabbit hole weirdness and conspiracy theory universes. That the Internet has unchained, taken what would be normal humans & turned them into fakes. This struggle is going to keep going. I wish these fakers all the failure and dejectedment their window shopped view of the world that their fake human perspective here deserves; I hope this infodump is burned down in the future by people happy to see this absurd farce against reality put to an end.