Intent and cultural understanding are critical in how we represent "facts". Eventually you want a human involved and AI just kicks that can down the road.
The article goes out of its way to say how bad Grokipedia is at the thing its supposed to be good at ("facts") and then says Wikipedia should copy some of the things it does.
The article cites finding obscure facts that humans might take a long time to piece together and providing balance and a neutral point of view.
The first is an obvious good use of AI: especially when it comes to statistics and raw facts, there's no reason why present or future LLMs couldn't do a good enough job. On the second point, I'm more inclined to pull out my usual joke that Wikipedia has a liberal bias because reality has a liberal bias, but it is true that many controversial issues were handled less than ideally, so AI can help? Maybe? Possibly?
> Musk’s encyclopedia also has a playful spirit that Wikipedia could learn from. Grokipedia’s homepage features random samples of recent edits that provide a glimpse at how the site is being improved.
tl;dr: "I wish my Wikipedia page was more detailed, therefore Wikipedia should adopt AI"
> Grok’s voracious internet searches sometimes find things that human editors don’t. The long article about me includes a substantive discussion of my research about lying in politics and my work with fact-checkers around the world, neither of which are in the Wikipedia version.
I.e., author is mad his wikipedia page doesn't portray him how he wants to be portrayed. At least insofar as the author doesn't get to dictate how his Wikipedia page frames him, this is working as intended. Maybe add some notes to the talk page about yourself if you want someone to take up the cause of glorifying your record more thoroughly.
> Grokipedia also provides some welcome balance. When it offers context, Grokipedia can be a little heavy with hype (“His work has been lauded for innovating transparency in media…”) But it also included a “Criticisms and Controversies” section that details complaints that PolitiFact is biased against Republicans. That section has a healthy back and forth about the critiques and my response. That kind of balance could be helpful for Wikipedia, which has taken heat from Musk and others for being too lefty.
I.e., Wikipedia has higher standards for what to include. Working as intended.
> Musk’s encyclopedia also has a playful spirit that Wikipedia could learn from. Grokipedia’s homepage features random samples of recent edits that provide a glimpse at how the site is being improved. Another Grokipedia feature reads articles aloud in an AI voice you select: Eve, who sounds like a BBC anchor; Ara, a serious woman with crisp diction; Leo, who might have been a professor at Oxford; and Sal, whose name suggests a sports bar but whose voice is NPR.
This really has nothing to do with Wikipedia's concerns about AI-generated edits to articles.
> My big takeaway from Grok is the importance of human judgment in curating knowledge. Grok is a bot trying to behave like a human editor. Its many mistakes and lousy writing show that AI is not ready to replace Wikipedia’s talented volunteers. Still, Grok shows that AI can be a tool that helps them research and write better articles.
None of the evidence described in the article suggests this conclusion.
> After seeing an AI encyclopedia up close through my experiences with Grok, I come away with hope. Yes, AI can be a sloppy researcher and an awful writer. But Grok’s performance, shaky as it was, highlighted AI’s readiness for higher-level responsibilities.
Literally contradicting the sentence before "AI can be a tool that helps them research and write better articles."
Intent and cultural understanding are critical in how we represent "facts". Eventually you want a human involved and AI just kicks that can down the road.
it fundamentally does not offer a single lesson for wikipedia.
Wikipedia's lesson: "Don't do a Grokipedia"
The article goes out of its way to say how bad Grokipedia is at the thing its supposed to be good at ("facts") and then says Wikipedia should copy some of the things it does.
I do not understand.
The article cites finding obscure facts that humans might take a long time to piece together and providing balance and a neutral point of view.
The first is an obvious good use of AI: especially when it comes to statistics and raw facts, there's no reason why present or future LLMs couldn't do a good enough job. On the second point, I'm more inclined to pull out my usual joke that Wikipedia has a liberal bias because reality has a liberal bias, but it is true that many controversial issues were handled less than ideally, so AI can help? Maybe? Possibly?
The assumption here is you can get the good thing while removing the bad things and it's basically a hand wave declaration of magic.
> Musk’s encyclopedia also has a playful spirit that Wikipedia could learn from. Grokipedia’s homepage features random samples of recent edits that provide a glimpse at how the site is being improved.
I invite the guy to discover https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ARecentC..., which is prominently linked on every page!
Minor edit for the author. Text contains "I’d all cluelessness" which I think is supposed to be "I’d [c]all cluelessness".
tl;dr: "I wish my Wikipedia page was more detailed, therefore Wikipedia should adopt AI"
> Grok’s voracious internet searches sometimes find things that human editors don’t. The long article about me includes a substantive discussion of my research about lying in politics and my work with fact-checkers around the world, neither of which are in the Wikipedia version.
I.e., author is mad his wikipedia page doesn't portray him how he wants to be portrayed. At least insofar as the author doesn't get to dictate how his Wikipedia page frames him, this is working as intended. Maybe add some notes to the talk page about yourself if you want someone to take up the cause of glorifying your record more thoroughly.
> Grokipedia also provides some welcome balance. When it offers context, Grokipedia can be a little heavy with hype (“His work has been lauded for innovating transparency in media…”) But it also included a “Criticisms and Controversies” section that details complaints that PolitiFact is biased against Republicans. That section has a healthy back and forth about the critiques and my response. That kind of balance could be helpful for Wikipedia, which has taken heat from Musk and others for being too lefty.
I.e., Wikipedia has higher standards for what to include. Working as intended.
> Musk’s encyclopedia also has a playful spirit that Wikipedia could learn from. Grokipedia’s homepage features random samples of recent edits that provide a glimpse at how the site is being improved. Another Grokipedia feature reads articles aloud in an AI voice you select: Eve, who sounds like a BBC anchor; Ara, a serious woman with crisp diction; Leo, who might have been a professor at Oxford; and Sal, whose name suggests a sports bar but whose voice is NPR.
This really has nothing to do with Wikipedia's concerns about AI-generated edits to articles.
> My big takeaway from Grok is the importance of human judgment in curating knowledge. Grok is a bot trying to behave like a human editor. Its many mistakes and lousy writing show that AI is not ready to replace Wikipedia’s talented volunteers. Still, Grok shows that AI can be a tool that helps them research and write better articles.
None of the evidence described in the article suggests this conclusion.
> After seeing an AI encyclopedia up close through my experiences with Grok, I come away with hope. Yes, AI can be a sloppy researcher and an awful writer. But Grok’s performance, shaky as it was, highlighted AI’s readiness for higher-level responsibilities.
Literally contradicting the sentence before "AI can be a tool that helps them research and write better articles."