Comment by kamranjon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kamranjon | Hacker News Reader

I've been reading a lot of Don Delillo lately and so I wanted to see how Grokipedia page on him fares.

I found the "Critiques of elitism" section and noticed this sentence:

"Reviews of Mao II (1991), for instance, highlighted the novel's focus on a performance artist protagonist as emblematic of this tendency, with detractors accusing DeLillo of prioritizing esoteric concerns over relatable human experiences, thereby catering to an academic or literary insider audience."

But Mao II does not have a performance artist as the protagonist, that is the book The Body Artist. Which seems like an obvious failure of the AI model to properly extract the information from the sourced article.

Also strange is that the sourced article (from Metro times) just as a passing comment says: "DeLillo’s choice of a performance artist as his protagonist is one reason why some critics have accused him of elitism." - so it would seem that it is being used as a primary source though it is actually a secondary source (which itself doesn't provide a source)

Overall I'm not too impressed and found some pretty predictable failures almost immediately...

Well it is only version v0.2

But is there any reason to not treat this as Wikipedia? As in, just suggest a correction?

See all the heavily biased content on the Joe Biden and Donald Trump articles?

Why not start there? Try to see if you can contribute a more neutral voice.

My guess is that the tone of these articles we see now is only the beginning. This thing is only a month old.

Then this will become the source of truth in the LLMs.

I cannot believe they've gone so against the spirit of contributors and that there's no legal recourse to stop this.

Open source and open content didn't bare enough fangs. It shouldn't have allowed profit.

We build open source for big tech. They use it (Linux, Redis, Elasticsearch, Python, etc.) to profit, keep us from owning the machines and systems (AWS) that concentrate and mechanize that profit. They then corral our labor, lay off, and move jobs overseas.

They expand into every industry and inject massive amounts of money to destabilize the incumbents. We literally just watched them dismantle the entire US film industry in just three years and swallow it whole. Tech is picking the bones dry.

And now it's happening with the media we create too.

If the pendulum of power swings, we MUST dismantle these companies. And we can't be slow like Lina Khan. It must be fast and furious like Project 2025.

We also need to weaponize our open source licenses.

Against the spirit of the contributors? You know Wikipedia's founders have heavily criticized Wikipedia's blatant political biases, right?

Having LLMs edit encyclopedias, moderate forums and do everything else we rely on user moderation for today is the way of the future. They can be much fairer, more predictable, controllable and put you less at the mercy of the army of whackjobs that end up controlling sites like Wikipedia and Reddit. Musk is once again at the forefront of this. The big question is cost. Volunteers work for "free" (often sadly, "free" means in return for the ability to manipulate the public discourse). But GPUs do not, and Grokipedia has no ads.

"Can be" does a lot of heavy lifting here. LLMs have not proven their reliability anywhere afaik.

Neither have humans. On Wikipedia humans are worse than unreliable, they're deliberately trying to deceive you. But LLMs can be improved.

I think humans can also improve. I’m not sure I agree that LLMs have as big a potential as the hype-train would like..

It is weird to call Wikipedia editors "an army of whackjobs" in the same paragraph as praising Elon for his vision in bringing hallucinated truth to the masses.

I'm a contributor and I'm fine with it. I believe in creative commons and anyone can do what they want. I think people will ignore Musk's thing.

People might - but will AIs? Personally, I think the chance of all of "Grokipedia" being filtered from all AI datasets & search queries is fairly small.

>> I've been reading a lot of Don Delillo lately and so I wanted to see how Grokipedia page on him fares.

> But is there any reason to not treat this as Wikipedia? As in, just suggest a correction?

How? I see no "Edit" link on the article:

* https://grokipedia.com/page/Don_DeLillo

as compared to:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_DeLillo

There is no "Talk" page as well, so if your change is 'contentious', how is consensus reached between different view points? Also, how does one link to previous revisions of an article? Further, how to do diffs between different revisions (there is "Edit history")?

Have you tried selecting the wrong section?

For me, a “Suggest Edit” button pops up at the bottom (on phone) after selecting some text.

Yeah I’ve seen the ability to suggest edits to grok and you can provide supporting evidence.

I haven’t done it myself though. But I’ve seen screenshots on X showing grok responding to the edits.

It looks like you have to be logged in to edit on crockipedia. I'm not willing to create an account to test this theory tho.

The problem is not whether you are impressed or not.

The problem is in the assumption/story/belief that "Intelligence" is "magic" can be "perfected". It's not true. Philosophers have known it forever. And the AI hypestorm will remind everyone how over rated intelligence actually is.

Intelligence can produce Socratic thought. It can also get Socrates killed. It can produce Aristotle and chase Aristotle out of the village. It can produce Einstein and make him depressed. It can produce Galileo and Gandhi and pretend what they say should be deleted.

People are told all the time Brains/Intelligence are special. Its not true. Even if human brains disappear tomorrow sky is not going to fall. Life and the universe will carry on happily on their merry way.

What can be called special is what happens to Information flowing through thousands and thousands of brains over thousands and thousands of years. What Information survives that process can be interesting. But its no where close to the what we see with Photosynthesis or the Krebs Cycle that emerges out of similar process of Information flowing through microbes.

The info through these processes constantly gets misplaced/corrupted/co-opted/deleted etc. Look at the Bible. Lot of people aren't impressed with it either. Yet it has lasted the downfall of nations, empires and kings.

It's survival has nothing to do with the quality of Information within it - https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152

The same applies to both wikipedia and grokpedia or whatever is produced next through "intelligence".

Once you realize your own brain is very imperfect you don't spend so much time worrying about chimp troupe drama generated through those brains. It's called flourishing through detachment - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181

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