Some time ago, there was a project called Citizendium that aimed for quality over quantity, with articles written and peer-reviewed by subject matter experts who had to use their real names and working email addresses, among other requirements. I always thought that was interesting, since the main critique of Wikipedia is its open editing model.

Citizendium is still around, though they've loosened some of the requirements in order to encourage more contributions, which seems self-defeating to me. I think they should have tried to cooperate with Wikipedia instead. The edits and opinions of subject matter experts could be a special layer on top of existing Wikipedia articles. Maybe there could be a link for various experts with highlights of sections they have peer-reviewed and a diff of what they would change about the article if those changes haven't been accepted. There could also be labels for how much expert consensus and trust there is on a given snapshot of an article or how frozen the article should be based on consensus and evidence provided by the experts. This would help users delineate whether an article contains a lot of common knowledge or whether it's more speculative or controversial.

> I suspect that xAI should probably have prioritised quality over quantity for the initial launch.

I mean, I don't think this is _for_ people who care about quality, tbh. For those, there is wikipedia. This is more of a safe space for Musk.

> I've spotted surprising amounts of confidently-stated nonsense

I find this to be the most annoying aspect of AI. The initial Google AI results were especially bad. It is getting better, but still spout info I know is false without any warning.

Like, I find blowhards tiring enough in RL. Don't really want to deal with artificial blowhards when I'm trying to solve a problem.

I wonder if something called "context" and the socio-economic direction might have something to do with it.

"I think we gotta hand it to Apartheid because schools were very slightly less worse" isn't the argument you think it is. It does paint where you stand quite clearly.

Never start a sentence with "I'm no apartheid apologist, but". Nothing good can ever come out of it.

Yeah I used to date a coloured girl from Jo'berg who'd grown up in that era and she was positive that they had some degree of prosperity and modern comforts unlike the surrounding African countries. The overwhelming flow of people voting with their feet and walking across the borders was from the surrounding countries to SA rather than vice versa.

But this is literal apartheid apologia.

Saying "advancements in black literacy and real wages during the era" as if those things are due to apartheid is offensively absurd.

How about we advance literacy and wages without, you know, all the apartheid.

Apologetics has a well-defined meaning. In this case, it's a bad faith deluge of out-of-context non-sequiturs posing as a coherent argument in order to defend something deplorable.

>A prevailing narrative depicts apartheid as a system of unremitting total oppression for black South Africans, yet empirical data indicate substantial advancements in black literacy and real wages during the era.

This is a false contradiction. You can oppress people and still pay them higher wages and fight illteracy.

Strange indeed. That feels like it shouldn't happen at all.

Among the more obvious errors are short runs to UIC/Halsted and a northwestern trajectory along Lake St from the loop.

But yes, it also suffers from attention to irrelevant detail.

The problem I have with most AI output like this is that it's just a huge wall of text that doesn't really say anything.

While ChatGPT tells me it's unable to access the linked page directly from Grokipedia (lolol), I was able to download the content, copy/paste it into ChatGPT, and ask it to fact check it. I think I will do this more often, with other sites (and other models) as well, going forward, as Chat is able to categorize statements as being correct vs. misleading vs. flat out wrong.

> The article does seem a bit much though. I've noticed a lot of the Grokipedia articles just go on.

And yes, that's what I'm noticing as well. There is a clear attempt to establish a narrative.

Why would you do free work for a company which is planning to profit from your labor? Wikipedia/Wikimedia is a non-profit. All of their money pays for real expenses instead of whatever vanity project Musk has decided is necessary to sell xAI to the masses.

> If you found something wrong in that article you should submit some fixes.

Why? This site isn't run by people who are interested in factual accuracy.

If they think Wikipedia articles are inaccurate, they could always propose changes and have a proper discussion with the rest of the contributors. Grok was trained on Wikipedia so realistically this is just a jumbled regurgitation of Wikipedia articles blended with other sources from across the web without the usual source vetting process that Wikipedia uses.

This is a politically motivated side project being run by the worlds richest man, and frankly I doubt many people are interested in helping him create his own padded version of reality.

Why on earth would anyone do free work for Elon Musk, of all people?

eh that requires making an account, which I'd prefer not to.

Oh yes it would be possible. It would probably be less biased as well. Don't forget that these models are trained on libraries of congress worth of books as well as things like Wikipedia. Given that Wikipedia - like any encyclopedia - does not (or should not, at least) contain original research but only refers to existing sources and given that the companies which train these models have their ways to access those sources - sometimes illegally but still - all Wikipedia adds to the mix is a biased interpretation of the original research.