[bebb]

Because it's a genuinely good idea, and hopefully one for which the execution will be improved upon over time.

In theory, using LLMs to summarize knowledge could produce a less biased and more comprehensive output than human-written encyclopedias.

Whether Grokipedia will meet that challenge remains to be seen. But even if it doesn't, there's opportunity for other prospective encyclopedia generators to do so.

[epistasis]

I don't why an LLM would be better in theory. The Wikipedia process is created to manage bias. LLMs are created to repeat the input data, and will therefore be quite biased towards the training data.

Humans looking through sources, applying knowledge of print articles and real world experiences to sift through the data, that seems far more valuable.

[smitty1e]

> The Wikipedia process is created to manage bias. LLMs are created to repeat the input data, and will therefore be quite biased towards the training data.

The perception of bias in Wikipedia remains, and if LLMs can detect and correct for bias, then Grokipedia seems at least a theoretical win.

I'm happy with at least a set of links for further research on a topic of interest.

[epistasis]

> The perception of bias in Wikipedia remains,

If there's a perception of bias, where is it coming from? It's clearly perception born from extreme political bias of the performers. Addressing that sort of perception by changing the content means increasing bias.

Therefore the only logical route forward to hash out incidences of perceived bias and addressing them to expose them as the bias themselves.

[thrance]

I fail to imagine how putting Wikipedia in the hands of an ideologically captured mega-billionaire will help the fight against bias. The owner of Grokipedia has shown times and times again that he has no regards for truth, and likes to advertise the many false things he believes in.

The technology behind it doesn't matter. Show me the incentives and I'll tell you the results: Wikipedia is decentralized, Grokipedia has a single owner.

[smitty1e]

To use your terminology, the perception that Wikipedia is "ideologically captured" stands.

[thrance]

How so? Because the community collectively refuses to host antivax or climate denialism propaganda? You can find these subjects on there btw, just with a mention correctly labelling them as falsehoods.

I'm yet to see conservatives bring up a single subject that Wikipedia allegedly silences out of ideology, that is not an obviously false conspiracy theory. In this, Wikipedia may appear to have a left-wing bias, but only because the modern right has gotten so divorced from reality that not relaying their propaganda feels like bias against them.

[smitty1e]

> "climate denialism propaganda"

Q.E.D.

[apical_dendrite]

Is there some objective standard for what is biased? For many people (including Elon Musk) biased just means something that they disagree with.

When grok says something factual that Elon doesn't like, he puts his thumb on the scale and changes how grok responds (see the whole South African white 'genocide' business). So why should we trust that an LLM will objectively detect bias, when the people in charge of training that LLM prefer that it regurgitate their preferred story, rather than what is objectively true?

[dragonwriter]

> Is there some objective standard for what is biased?

Generally, no.

With a limited domain of verifiable facts, you could perhaps measure a degree of deviation from fact across different questions, though how you get a distance measure for not just one question but that meaningfully aggregates across multiple is slippery without getting into subjective areas. Constructing a measure of directionality would be even harder to do objectively, too.

[quantified]

Summarizing all the knowledge is very very far from summarizing all that is written. All it takes is including everything published. The earth must be flat. Disease is caused by bad morals. Etc etc.