alt Hacker NewsThe concept of Grokipedia reminds me of the old (now defunct? won't load) "Conservapedia" project that basically only had detailed pages for topics where observable fact was incompatible with political ideology--so for these topics, the site showed the Alternative Facts that conformed to that ideology. If you looked up something non-political like "Traffic Light" or "Birthday Cake" there would be no article at all. Because being a complete repository of information was not an actual goal of the site.
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Another defunct site is Deletionpedia, which compiled articles that had been removed from Wikipedia for not meeting various criteria (usually relating to notability IIRC). The site is dead but the HN discussion lives on:
"Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297057
Have you tried Grokipedia yet?
Cuz you’ve mainly addressed the concept. But have you read a bunch of articles? Found inaccuracies? Seen the edit process?
Cuz, regardless of ideology, the edit process couldn’t have been done before because AI like this didn’t exist before.
Besides the political slant of Grokipedia, it's true that a lot of work that needed to be crowdsourced can be now packaged as work for LLMs. We all know the disadvantages of using LLMs, so let me mention some of the advantages: much higher speed, much more impervious to groupthink, cliques, and organised campaigns; truly ego-less editing and debating between "editors". Grokipedia is not viable because of Musk's derangement, but other projects, more open and publicly auditable, might come along.
Conservapedia had to have a person create each article and didn't have the labor or interest. Grok can spew out any number of pages on any subject, and those topics that aren't ideologically important to Musk will just be the usual LLM verbiage that might be right or might not.
Non-political? Birthday cakes are distributed free of charge to the guests, with same sized portions for all, that's pure and simple communism! /s
Right, but the reason that Conservapedia fizzled out is that you can't really build a critical mass of human editors if the only reason your site exists is that you have a very specific view on dinosaurs and homosexuality (even among hardline conservatives, most will not share your views).
What's different with Grokipedia is that you now have an army of robots who can put a Young Earth spin on a million articles overnight.
I do think that as it is, Grokipedia is a threat to Wikipedia because the complaints about accuracy don't matter to most people. And if you're in the not-too-unpopular camp that the cure to the subtle left-wing bias of Wikipedia is robotically injecting more egregious right-wing bias, the project is up your alley.
The best hope for the survival of Wikipedia is that everyone else gets the same idea and we end up with 50 politically-motivated forks at each others' throats, with Wikipedia being the comparatively normal, mainstream choice.