alt Hacker NewsGrokipedia Is the Antithesis of Wikipedia
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For me, the scary moment was seeing Grokipedia show up as one of the “sources” in a random Claude query a few days ago. Even if people don’t explicitly choose to use it, poisoning the well is working.
Nobody remembers Conservapedia. The shoulders of giants indeed.
Minor point - but I think Grokipedia's design looks much worse than Wikipedia. I can't put my finger on it, but maybe because Grokipedia's main text is too narrow (I'm on a laptop). (I may be biased by loving Wikipedia though).
Just look at the article on HN[1] on Grokipedia. It's almost 5500+ words long. The Wikipedia article is not even 500 words[2]. This won't be a problem if the article contained anything of substance. It doesn't. It's written as if LLM was specifically instructed to be as verbose and as boring as possible.
> Its algorithmic ranking system, which weights recent votes more heavily to counter brigading and promote fresh, high-signal content, combined with editorial moderation to curb low-quality or off-topic posts, has cultivated a reputation for rigorous debate, though not without internal tensions over shifting cultural norms, perceived negativity in comments, and debates on whether business-oriented stories overshadow pure technical discourse
What surprises is not the fact that it exists. Elon is a man with a fragile ego and a history of cheap stunts like this. It’s the fact that he still has almost cult-like base that treats him as some kind of mankind's savior despite all of this.
[1]: https://grokipedia.com/page/Hacker_News [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News
Why would anyone trust Elon Musk with anything having to do with AI?
Just last week he was caught tuning Grok to say positive things about him, something Grok took so seriously that it said Elon would be the best piss drinker in the world, and it put Elon Musk in the top 3 of every human category, from philosophy to boxing to basketball.
If he can’t pass up the temptation to put his foot on that scale, why would you trust anything generated by an LLM under his control?
Of course, nothing matters anymore and there’s no more blowback for anything.
It's illuminating to see how the Twitter Grok and the Web Grok differ. Twitter Grok clearly either has a different system prompt or some fine-tuning to effectively evade saying anything negative about the administration or Elon. To the point where it will say Elon is more athletic than LeBron (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...).
This is going to be a pretty big problem with both closed-AI and OSS AI where you don't see the provenance of its RLHF. If you manipulate your AI to deliberately push political preferences, that is your right I guess but IMO I'd appreciate some regulation saying you should be required to disclose that under penalty of perjury.
If Wikipedia was not real, it would sound like a naive utopian thing you’d read in a bad paperback. Multi-language repository of basically all human knowledge that’s extremely resistant to government capture and contributed by volunteers totally transparently? Bullshit. And yet … there it is.
One thing I haven't seen brought up throughout the dialogue about Wikipedia and bias:
Since the entire edit history is available, isn't it possible / practical / probably not crazy hard w/ AI help to build a "dissentipedia", where the articles are built as if various edit wars had gone the other way?
I'd certainly read such a thing and compare / contrast it to WikiPedia (particularly when looking for cited primary sources).
Month ago talk about Grokipedia:
Grokipedia by xAI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459
Tim Bray on Grokipedia
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45777015
Grokipedia and the coup against reality
The article is 100% correct that there is a fundamental political rift between a human/decentralized and AI/centralized encyclopedia. I have a personal preference for the former, but I can see the advantage of the newer approach in terms of clarity and quality on several topics as well as being more homogeneous in its bias (Wikipedia has all kinds of cliques who dominate pockets of the encyclopedia).
As a meta point, while I don't personally care for Grokipedia's agenda I am quite frankly impressed that something like Grokipedia could be stood up so quickly and this feels like a net positive. While Grokipedia is centralized Wikipedia is also a monolith in its own right and plagued by problems (cliques of editors routinely exert their authority over subdomains to the detriment of the truth). If a small group can spin up their own version of Wikipedia then there is the possibility of a more broad diverse market place of ideas.
For example, Wikipedia's math articles are notoriously abstruse and generally unsuitable for beginners. An encyclopedia that emphasizes a non-technical approach in this domain could be very helpful - though it would almost certainly not be worth the herculean effort to build such a thing as a pure wiki. As an AI wiki one could spin up an encyclopedia for a variety of skill levels (i.e. grade school, college level, graduate level).
Finally, in case anyone on Grok's team is reading this, the thing that really annoys me most about Grokipedia's UX is that it has no blue links to other articles. It would not be hard to automate this on Grokipedia, but currently there is no possibility of tunneling down some rabbit hole of human knowledge until you find yourself in a totally unfamiliar area. Politics is one thing, but a Wikipedia clone with no links is really no better than just asking ChatGPT.
This seems like an old article, but probably still true today
What I don't get is, why wouldn't Elon just make a good version of Grokipedia. It seems way easier than continually telling his 200MM+ followers how great a deeply broken product is.
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...