Tim Bray's Experience with Grokipedia: AI-Generated Encyclopedia Entries vs. Wikipedia
By
Bogdanp
Pure flour-power. Hearty enough to carry you through lunch.
Summary
Tim Bray shares his experience discovering Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia that created a 7,000+ word entry about him using LLM technology trained on sources including his Wikipedia article and blog. He finds the content verbose, boring, and lacking the editorial rigor of Wikipedia, noting that while it contains factual information, it's padded with unnecessary details and lacks the human curation that makes Wikipedia valuable.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledMy Grokipedia entry has over seven thousand words, compared to a mere 1,300 in my Wikipedia article.
It's pretty clear how it was generated; an LLM, trained on who-knows-what but definitely including that Wikipedia article and this blog, was told to go nuts.
The Grokipedia article is boring. It's not wrong, but it's boring.
Wikipedia is a miracle. It's a miracle of human collaboration, of editorial rigor, of community standards.
Grokipedia is what happens when you let an AI loose on a topic without human curation.
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