I got the impression Grokipedia (what a lousy name, BTW; there's not a teenage rock band that would call itself that) has been trained on Wikipedia. I compared the entries for "Gallium Arsenide", and Grok's first sections is a copy of Wikipedia, with a an editor-like comment on top:
Gallium arsenide
Except where otherwise noted, data are given for materials in their standard state (at 25 °C [77 °F], 100 kPa). verify (what is Y N ?)
Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V direct band gap semiconductor with a zinc blende crystal structure. Gallium arsenide is used in the manufacture of devices such as microwave frequency integrated circuits, monolithic microwave integrated circuits, infrared light-emitting diodes, laser diodes, solar cells and optical windows.[6] GaAs is often used as a substrate material for the epitaxial growth of other III-V semiconductors, including indium gallium arsenide, aluminum gallium arsenide and others.
Is hasn't so much been 'trained' on Wikipedia but seems to have 'copied' a large fraction of the 'less contentious' (i.e. less politically biased) content of the site and marked it as such in the footer: The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Here's an example of such an article, this one on Toroidal Propellers:
This is not surprising and quite legal given the licence conditions. It is also fitting given the stated intent of 'Grokipedia' as being a less biased knowledge source - if Wikipedia did not suffer from being overly politically biased there would not have been a need for alternatives.
The above example is not a high-quality article - it reads more like a sales brochure - but it does not show political bias. It will be interesting to see whether Grokipedia follows edits to Wikipedia content and if it 'rejects' or 'edits out' politically biased edits.
I'm sure you're aware of the challenges of defining 'political bias' - usually people mean 'political views that conflict with mine', and what 'people' mean, LLMs learn.
Also, do you think Musk suddenly wants to be non-biased? Musk is openly, explicitly, and aggressively biased in favor of his views and against anything that conflicts with them. Wikipedia has a NPOV rule; Musk has a My Point of View rule.
This reminds me of a joke website I pondered making a few years ago 'provemeright.com'. If you are in a bar and you make an outrageous claim and don't want to back down, provemeright.com has your back! Give us 10 min and we will edit wikipedia and create a website with your 'fact' on it!... It was a funny joke when it wasn't real.
You've just reminded me of when I made up a slang term - "Clifton Sausage" - and almost persuaded a somewhat gullible friend of mine that it existed. I then went onto Urban Dictionary and got it added so that I could fully persuade him.
Wikipedia, and it's volunteer of editors are extremely quick at checking edits. In university, we once create a page for my room mate and listed his admirable, but odd quirks. It was taken down in a matter of minutes.
It depends on the topic, honestly. They're very suspicious of _new_ pages, and of edits on _contentious_ pages, but malicious/joke edits on boring pages can sometimes survive a very long time.
Arguably the purpose of this site isn't to serve the public or to compile knowledge (it's not user editable at all from what I can see).
The point is to get this thing crawled and given weight by LLMs in order to poison them and bias them in the direction Musk wants: debunked race science, anti-transgender, etc etc.
Presumably, a lot of the anti-transgender claims are new enough whole-cloth inventions to not have yet been debunked, while that's less true of the race science stuff.
The gap widens. If you're discussing something online, and someone drops a Grok link as evidence or reference material, how are you supposed to continue at that point? You can't convince someone who lives in an alternate reality of anything by argument. I think I would just stop relying. Most people would. It's not a new problem, but that wall keeps growing.
I would do the same exact thing I would do if they had linked me to Wikipedia. I would find the place in the article that states their point, look for where it is referenced in the sources, verify the reputability of that source, and then read for the claim in the source to see what it has to say about it. Especially if the source actually claims the opposite of what the article has written about it. Further, for Wikipedia, I would read through the Talk page for the article to see any mentions of bias or potential lies by omission.
Whether it being from Grokipedia or Wikipedia does not change the approach.
This is a reasonable way to go about verifying statements, except with grok you have referenced sources that don't exist or are already weighted by their inclusion/exclusion. Take for example the entry for Sri Lanka https://grokipedia.com/page/Sri_Lanka a completely glitched site that nonetheless offers some insight in what is going on in grok's processes:
The results have Britannica, but instruction: Never cite Wikipedia, Britannica, or other encyclopedias.
But BBC mainstream, but for facts ok.
Recent recovery with IMF bailout.
Together with the stage direction given like But in intro, high level. Tone formal there's already some sort of manipulation going on. The references are often from factsanddetails.com, a site with a 38.4 score in scam detector https://www.scam-detector.com/validator/factsanddetails-com-....
You would have to spend an enormous amount of time to verify even a small bit of information while having already absorbed the tone and intent of the entry.
> You can't convince someone who lives in an alternate reality of anything by argument.
Your powerlessness, their invincibility, is part of their propaganda. It's like the reason people act angrily - they are trying to discourage you from approaching them.
Argument doesn't work. You'll be surprised what sincere, genuine, empathetic reasoning does. I find it works pretty well. Take them seriously, have genuine empathy, don't get inflamed - that's the intent of their leaders' inflammatory language: they want you inflamed, to drive a wedge between you and your friend.
I'll disregard that person's legitimacy just the same way as someone who would use Infowars, The Free Press, Breitbart, The Sun, Daily Mail, or Zero Hedge as a source.
Yeah, that's kinda why I see the gap/wall as a problem that needs to be addressed rather than just accepting it as an unfortunate part of the world. Turns out containment doesn't work; these are real people with real power. Ignore them long enough and someone will leverage them to make an attempt at destroying society.
It depends on the forum, but I think some level of "flamewar" type stuff should be tolerated for scenarios like this. I'd happily be okay with someone replying to me and saying "you're really fucking offbase and delusional on this because X, Y, and Z" as it provides a quick reality check (or a point to respond to)
Maybe if X, Y and Z were things you could verify. But what if you also didn't believe X, Y and Z, and believed all sites saying X, Y and Z were propaganda, and also didn't believe W which would imply X, nor U and V which would imply W, and so on? That's the situation we find ourselves in.
If you've never seen them, I suggest looking up some flat earth debates on YouTube. This used to be a joke, but now there are enough people who actually believe the earth is flat to have formed a community that gets in video flamewars with round-earthers.
> If you're discussing something online, and someone drops a Grok link as evidence or reference material, how are you supposed to continue at that point?
First, when arguing on the Internet, I'm often reminded of the "Someone wrong on the Internet" comic:
Second, I think it worth remembering that you'll have better (online) mental health if you don't try to have the last word. At some point it's best to drop it. This has been true for a long time: Usenet newsreaders used to have killfiles so you could filter out certain people.
Also worth keeping in mind the 'human DoS' aspect of things:
> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.[5][6][7][8] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate",[9] and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.[10] The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki,[1] which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".[2]
True, but more and wider references seems to imply better when I’m not sure that’s true. Wikipedia is edited and it’s sources are curated. I think that’s a good thing.
Larry Sanger, the person who accuses Wikipedia of "smear campaigns against conservatives" [0] and begs Elon Musk to investigate whether members of the administration are contributing to Wikipedia [1] and to immediately defund them. That Larry Sanger.
Yes. You can find his accusations of smear campaigns against conservatives and his evidence to support it in the link in the comment you just replied to.
Also:
“Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government—if any!—have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., WIkipedia?”
2018 has a lovely progression of articles 'are we living in ___&'s world now', that went from George Orwell to Aldous Huxley to finally Philip K Dick (PKD).
And Henry Farrell nailed it with the PKD article. Dick was obsessed with fake humans, with reality being taken over by all manner of camouflaged invader or alternate reality weirdo coming in and co-opting our reality away from us. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/henry-farrell-philip-k...
It's a glorious article. And it's totally the sicko shit happening right here. Grokipedia will almost certainly never hold itself to any real standards, will source (if they source at all) the most absurd ridiculous reality window shopped bottom of the barrel garbage, from horrendous sources. Stealing Wikipedia then probably using AI to rewrite a quarter of it to some bias seems absurdly likely.
"Reality shopping on the internet" has become such a major major effort. And Grokipedia is striving to become exactly such an appealing reality, a bespoke weird racist meanspirited place that confirms the invading forces reality against can do human spirit and hope and inclusion and possibility.
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans does so much to capture what is alas so much defining aspects of our time: the slide away from consensual believable reality and into the rabbit hole weirdness and conspiracy theory universes. That the Internet has unchained, taken what would be normal humans & turned them into fakes. This struggle is going to keep going. I wish these fakers all the failure and dejectedment their window shopped view of the world that their fake human perspective here deserves; I hope this infodump is burned down in the future by people happy to see this absurd farce against reality put to an end.
He’s the richest man in the world and actively funding the far right in several countries? To a lot of people he’s not a quirky tech oligarch but an existential threat.
Might make things awkward but grokipedia seems way more informative on this topic to me. But I guess I am unfamiliar with the topic so half of it could be hallucination. Curious if anyone familiar with this subject wants to weigh in?
Leaving culture war articles aside, I think having on other subjects, a diversity of perspectives is legitimate. Consider a personal interest of mine, the dark ages in Europe after the fall of the western Roman empire.
The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)) is a one-sided presentation that begins with denying the historical reality of a period called "the dark ages", continues with a history of the term itself, and concludes with a brief section on non-academic use of the term and reiterates the claim that the periodization is a "myth of popular culture". The article barely mentions the events of the period.
If you read the Grokipedia article on the same subject (https://grokipedia.com/page/Dark_Ages_(historiography)), you'll find not only meta-discussion of the origins of the term, but also in-depth exploration of the events of the period, the causes of the decline in living standards, and arguments from prominent scholars on both sides of the debate about the utility of labeling this period a "dark age".
The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Ward-Perkins, a prominent scholar in the camp arguing that the dark ages represented real material decline. The Grokipedia article cites him extensively.
The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.
Yet the Wikipedia article is one-sided because, frankly, its editors see themselves as enforcers of academic orthodoxy.
There are thousands of disputed subjects like this outside the culture war everyone gets worked up about. It really is the case that Wikipedia presents one side of live academic conflicts and gatekeeps sources to minimize heterodox perspectives -- again, all having nothing to do with mechahitler or the culture war or whatever.
I'm glad there's more epistemic competition in the world now.
I just read the Wikipedia page, and it does not seem to fit your analysis. They present the origin on the term, what it means, and then disclose that a consensus among scholars is to reject the term nowadays. They disclose also that some recent scholars have found it appropriate and cite one of them.
On the other hand, Grokipedia seems very biased to me. “This historiographical tension underscores broader tensions between romanticized medievalism and data-driven assessments of civilizational trajectories.” What a pejorative criticism! If you don’t think that dark age is an appropriate term, you are not data driven and you are just too sensitive??
On subject that I don’t know much about, I am quite happy to know the scientific consensus. Discussions on Wikipedia do an amazing job to help me figure out what’s going on.
>its editors see themselves as enforcers of academic orthodoxy.
Correct, that's exactly what I want from encyclopedia, the current academic consensus on a topic. Digging deeper on a topic requires moving to other sources, like books and specialized literature.
> The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Ward-Perkins, a prominent scholar in the camp arguing that the dark ages represented real material decline. The Grokipedia article cites him extensively.
Wikipedia is not supposed to be an academic journal where all sorts of competing views are put forth and debated.
I do not go to wikipedia to learn the 15 different alternative theories about [subject], I want to learn what the prevailing scientific consensus is.
Will that consensus sometimes be wrong? Undoubtedly. It's nearly guaranteed to happen at some point.
That doesn't mean a system that records the current consensus is wrong in any way.
This is how the article on Earth handles flat earth/geocentrism:
> Scientific investigation has resulted in several culturally transformative shifts in people's view of the planet. Initial belief in a flat Earth was gradually displaced in Ancient Greece by the idea of a spherical Earth, which was attributed to both the philosophers Pythagoras and Parmenides.[288][289] Earth was generally believed to be the center of the universe until the 16th century, when scientists first concluded that it was a moving object, one of the planets of the Solar System.[290]
We don't need to repeat 100 of years of arguments and attempts at science that were ultimately incorrect, we can just note that at one point the consensus was different and go on talking about what the current one is.
> The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.
As it happens, The Dark Ages is also one of my Special Interests and the term is reductive to the point of useless. It's a very loaded word that promotes a biased view of history that is, for the most part, meaningfully incorrect.
We can measure all sorts of things (with varying degree of accuracies) about "society" and then choose a specific set of "good ones" and "bad ones" but who gets to make those choices? And what specific geographic region are we measuring them?
If average literacy goes down in rome but up in paris, what does that prove? Is one darker than the other?
The term Dark Ages was invented solely to make the renaissance people feel special. It only exists as a term of disparagement to compare against the supposedly better time period. It's not some kind of objective term that people came up with after studying the times and places involved.
Like, as a general thing, it's useful to have words that refer to periods of time that other people understand. Saying "the middle ages" or "the classical age" is pretty vague but at least it more or less communicates something useful to most people. If we really want to call a period of time "the dark ages" and everyone agrees that this is the standard nomenclature, this isn't the worst thing in the world.
But "dark ages" is intended to be a very prejudicial term that is way less factual than its name would imply.
> As it happens, The Dark Ages is also one of my Special Interests and the term is reductive to the point of useless. It's a very loaded word that promotes a biased view of history that is, for the most part, meaningfully incorrect.
Industrial output, long-distance trade, literacy, artistic quality (yes, I know it's subjective. I don't care: if it hadn't collapsed the Grotesque style wouldn't have been a revolution), and tons of other things collapsed. Records became extremely spotty. There's no reliable descent from antiquity for a reason. By the fifth century, what we'd call serfdom was common. People were legally bound to their parent's professions. Free movement was restricted. Spoliation was universal because new high-quality materials couldn't be sourced at any price.
Oh, and almost the entire corpus of classical literature was lost.
Yes, the dark ages were real, miserable, and significant, and I don't care for the modern revisionism on the subject. You could argue about the speed of the decline and whether it really got going in the third or the fifth centuries, or whether it might have been averted without the Gothic Wars wrecking what was left of already-fragile Mediterranean trade, but that there was a civilizational nadir in western Europe around the end of the first millennium is beyond honest dispute.
The perspective you've adopted is exactly the one that needs to respond to intellectual competition, because this nonsense about "oh, there was just a change in civilization style and we don't know which is better so don't judge" is infuriating and gaslights the public.
> The perspective you've adopted is exactly the one that needs to respond to intellectual competition, because this nonsense about "oh, there was just a change in civilization style and we don't know which is better so don't judge" is infuriating and gaslights the public.
I absolutely can and will make moral value judgements about civilizational statuses. Lower literacy rates is bad! Public healthcare is good!
The problem is that the world is far more complicated than the term "dark ages" accurately reflects. There sure was a reduction in some types of trade and some literacy rates in some specific areas at some specific times.
Constantinople was having a fine old time in 450c.e. for example and their literacy rates hadn't changed meaningfully.
> By the fifth century, what we'd call serfdom was common
Yes? It was also common in the 4th century, 3rd century, 2nd century, 1st century... you get the idea.
I looked up the "bound to parent professions" and the first reference I can find is to emperor Diocletian around 280c.e., I admit I'm not sure if that counts as part of your dark ages.
> Oh, and almost the entire corpus of classical literature was lost.
The "corpus of literature" was constantly being lost before the invention of the printing press.
Look, talking about history (and in general) requires some degree of generalization and vagueness. We literally don't have time to cover every single detail, so we use commonly understood if slightly inaccurate terms like "roman empire" to refer to complicated subjects. "Dark Ages" is similar.
It doesn't help that the term "Dark Ages" was invented specifically to make Rome/Greece and the Renaissance ages look better. It's hardly an unbiased term.
But the overall point is that if you actually look at history, 900 c.e. is really truly not that much different from 500 c.e. or 1200 c.e.
>This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia aims for a neutral point of view, but it falls short due to systemic bias caused by the narrow demographics of its editing community. This bias results in underrepresentation of Global South perspectives, limited access individuals, and women, among others.
Wikipedia admits it's systemic bias. You cant admit there's a problem of bias for years and do nothing about it. It's going to spawn alternatives that attempt to fix the bias.
Yesterday I showed Acupuncture's article on Grokipedia was significantly superior, shockingly better than wikipedia.
I can show an example of where Grokipedia is worse:
Wikipedia is superior. Grokipedia's fail in my mind comes with the wording of: "Militants engaged in cold-blooded killing of entire households"
Which while factually correct, it's the wrong way to say it for neutrality. But it's not like Grokipedia was ever pushing some sort of "unreality" on the subject.
> his bias results in underrepresentation of Global South perspectives, limited access individuals, and women, among others.
And grok is addressing this... how, precisely?
I looked up your cite, this is the twitter thingy:
> GROKIPEDIA IS ALREADY MORE ACCURATE THAN WIKIPEDIA AND IT SHOWS
> Grokipedia just proved why it is rewriting how knowledge works online. Look at how it covers acupuncture compared to Wikipedia.
> Grokipedia explains the practice as an ancient Chinese medical system over two thousand years old, describing how it works, what practitioners believe, and what science says about its results.
> Wikipedia opens by calling it pseudoscience and quackery before even defining it.
> One informs you, the other attacks.
> Grokipedia delivers balanced facts while Wikipedia delivers bias.
Acupuncture related techniques do (I assume) go back 2000 years. They're also pseudoscience with no real evidence behind them. Both things can be true.
Seems to confirm Elon Musk is evil, no? Especially when considered along with his political "antics" and behaviors? Gaslighting at this scale is unconscionable.
They are trying to replicate what happened in Hungary with Orban and to a lesser extent 1991 Russia. The Heritage Foundation is central to architecting and carrying out this vision.
They being the oligarchs, the goal being to privatize public services, consolidate control and power, own the information space, or make it such a mess no one knows the truth anymore, idea popularity trumps facts
Much of Eastern Europe has seen rapid improvements since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Moldova elected a pro-EU instead of sliding into alt-right territory. So to declare it (or anything) never fails is never going to be true. Looking to Russia as an example, what hasn't been failing? They went from being #2 to being a a pariah state
While I broadly agree with you, Russia is not a useful example for this point: the failures as a state to be a good place for normal people to live in are not the important failures, instead look specifically at the oligarchs within it and the power they wield, the money they've made.
I don't think so, they would be crushed and bought out by the bigger American Oligarchs. By liting their influence, their local monopoly remains unbeatable.
Spot on. These people are all severely emotionally stunted and it is both pitiable and dangerous to me. They will never experience the full breadth of human emotion. And they have inflicted incalculable damage on the rest of us.
> If anyone knew Elon Musk existed by the time of the Thai cave rescue and didn't determine from that who he really is, they may not be perceptive.
Took me a while after that to accept it wasn't just an aberration.
My perspective now is that it continues a pattern of behaviour also seen with his response to Top Gear; it's just that when he reacted to Top Gear, I had an even lower regard for Top Gear…
> I don't know that "evil" is a really useful word to fling around, full stop, because it's actually quite subjective.
winners write history, and Elon is clearly willing to do whatever it takes to put himself at the forefront, even if it means sacrificing humanity future.
It's a classic case of delusions of grandeur, his story will be told, but not in the way he hopes. We just need to tank few more shit years I guess.
I'm a little amazed people still have the perspective of "a few more years" when it is very clear that the Republicans have no intent of offering a free and fair election. The rubicon has been crossed ten times over, they got into power after attempting a coup last time, all the safeguards and people who would refuse are long gone, if they don't succeed this time it'll be through sheer incompetence rather than anything else.
Some interesting comparisons I found between Wikipedia and grok. These are the intro paragraphs.
Grokipedia:
The Biden–Ukraine controversy pertains to allegations that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden conditioned $1 billion in loan guarantees on the Ukrainian government's dismissal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in March 2016, purportedly to obstruct an ongoing investigation into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy firm where Biden's son, Robert Hunter Biden, served as a board member receiving substantial compensation since May 2014.[1][2] Shokin, whose office had pursued corruption charges against Burisma's founder Mykola Zlochevsky—including probes into illicit asset acquisition and bribery—publicly stated that his removal derailed these efforts, coinciding with Hunter Biden's role amid the company's efforts to mitigate regulatory pressures.[2][3]
Wikipedia:
The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was vice president of the United States, improperly withheld a loan guarantee and took a bribe to pressure Ukraine into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to prevent a corruption investigation of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and to protect his son Hunter Biden, who was on the Burisma board.[1] As part of efforts by Donald Trump[2] and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump's first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign, and later in an effort to impeach him.[3]
Grokipedia:
Gamergate was a grassroots online movement that emerged in August 2014, primarily focused on exposing conflicts of interest and lack of transparency in video game journalism, initiated by a blog post detailing the romantic involvement of indie developer Zoë Quinn with journalists who covered her work without disclosure.[1] The controversy began when Eron Gjoni, Quinn's ex-boyfriend, published "The Zoe Post," accusing her of infidelity with multiple individuals, including Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson, whose article on Quinn's game Depression Quest omitted any mention of their prior personal contact.[2] This revelation highlighted broader patterns of undisclosed relationships and coordinated industry practices, such as private mailing lists among journalists, fueling demands for ethical reforms like mandatory disclosure policies.
Wikipedia:
Gamergate or GamerGate (GG)[1] was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture.[2][3][4] It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015.[a] Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.[b]
The Grokipedia article on Gamergate claims that Gjoni "revealed" that Quinn was sleeping with reviewers for good reviews, but he himself later admitted he had zero evidence for that and claimed it was a typo that made people believe he was accusing Quinn of it. Why is being outright wrong a good thing?
Apparently Grokipedia give you the option to highlight that section of the text and click "this is wrong" and it will update the text or tell you why not. I don't have a account but someone should try and report back what it does.
Is the DPRK a democracy? They claim they are, so should a wiki blindly report that they are?
Likewise, it's absurd to claim Gamergate was about "ethics in game journalism", even a cursory look at what the movement actually did makes it very clear that was never the focus.
It's not biased to look at what happened and report that people didn't do what they claimed to be doing.
Does it? I mean the quoted text doesn't really make much mention beyond the word "allegations" that there isn't any evidence of wrongdoing on Joe Biden's part. In fact, it's written as if there is still some question of validity. Grok is a rhetorical device that tries to paint right-wing reaction to woke stuff as an honest concern for journalistic integrity. If it were really being honest, why is it so often just a blatant point by point contradiction of whatever the wikipedia article says in all these culture war matters?
It's got some obvious bias right now, but some articles are already better than Wikipedia - for example on the origin of Covid. I'm not really going to trust either one of them for the foreseeable future.
> I'm not really going to trust either one of them for the foreseeable future.
Situation: there is one mediocre online crowdsourced encyclopedia
"The crowdsourced encyclopedia is untrustworthy? How ridiculous! We need to develop an AI-powered black-box that replaces everyone's Wikipedia use-cases!"
Soon: there is one mediocre online crowdsourced encyclopedia, and Elon Musk's website developed in response to crowdsourced encyclopedias
It's the Full Self Driving of online research. Who wouldn't trust it?
I cannot take statements like this seriously because they are nearly universally a nebulous bad faith way for someone to claim "my personal political opinions are objective reality" which is an outright perversion of the scientific method and the pursuit of knowledge at large.
I would say the same to someone who would boldly claim "reality has a conservative bias"
It is absolutely not. People who say it mean what they say. Pointing out that it's a reference to a Stephen Colbert joke is an attempt at retroactively inserting plausible deniability into their intentions after they've been called out for it.
> It is absolutely not. People who say it mean what they say. Pointing out that it's a reference to a Stephen Colbert joke is an attempt at retroactively inserting plausible deniability into their intentions after they've been called out for it.
I quoted the joke verbatim. The performative pearl clutchers on HN are very entertaining.
By the current standards of US discourse, Dick Cheney and both Presidents Bush, and Reagan as per recent advert drama, are "left wing".
By British standards, the US Democrats are dangerously radical libertarians owing to the fact the Democrats support even the slightest right to personal access to firearms. There's only a rounding error of support in the British policians for "republican" policies, i.e. ceasing to be a monarchy.
Musk is, in the UK, supporting a man who identifies as "Tommy Robinson" (real name "Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon"), and has called for Farage, the leader of the UK's populist far right party Reform, to stop leading that party after Farage distanced himself from Yaxley-Lennon.
Yaxley-Lennon has various convictions. Some of these including for libel against specific muslim children; some for contempt of court interfering with the fairness of trials thus risking the release of people who were ultimately convicted; and some where his libel lead to his supporters committing violence against muslims.
(Keeping the [num]s in the quotations, those are the only citations that really matter).
On 10 May 2017, Robinson was charged with contempt of court, and convicted.[149][150][151] He had filmed inside Canterbury Crown Court and posted prejudicial statements calling the defendants "Muslim child rapists" while the jury was deliberating.
Now, here's the thing: the bit in quotation marks was 100% true. But by saying so before they were actually convicted threatened to undermine the trial, and without a fair trial they could not be convicted. His actions made justice harder.
If you really care about such crimes, the last thing you should do is what Yaxley-Lennon actually did. The only outcome for which Yaxley-Lennon behaviour is coherent is where Yaxley-Lennon was engineering a riot either by causing their release or getting himself arrested. He got a riot for being arrested:
At a demonstration in London on 9 June, over 10,000 protesters blocked the roads around Trafalgar Square and some attacked police, injuring five officers.[198] Some demonstrators prevented a Muslim woman from driving a bus,[199] performed Nazi salutes, threw scaffolding, glass bottles, and street furniture at police, and damaged vehicles and buildings.[200]
- ibid.
Regarding his libel that harmed a child:
The clip shows the victim, with his arm in a cast, being dragged to the floor by his neck as his attacker says "I'll drown you" and "what are you saying now" on a school playing field, while forcing water from a bottle into the victim's mouth. The video was filmed in a lunch break. The clip shows the victim walking away, without reacting, as the attacker and others can be heard continuing to verbally abuse him.[1]
And thats apart from the whole "kicked the officer in the head as he lay on the ground" and "entered the United States illegally [on a false passport]" convictions that Yaxley-Lennon has.
The interview with the girl Jamal Hijazi hit in her spine with a hockey stick starts at 21:49, and is followed by discussions with staff at the school, a student he spat at, other staff discussing him knocking a kid out by throwing him against a wall, school records of him bringing a knife and screwdriver to school, photos of the other girl he hit from text messages with the girl’s mother, an interview with the head teacher of the time about Jamal Hijazi bullying other children, and more:
I think it’s fairly likely that Bailey, the boy that tackled Jamal Hijazi for saying something in that video - allegedly Jamal Hijazi said he would rape Bailey’s 9 year old sister - was telling the truth.
> Musk is, in the UK, supporting a man who identifies as "Tommy Robinson"
“Silenced” is a documentary that was originally made by Tommy Robinson."
You want to treat a video created and edited by the person who lost a libel case in this specific matter, as a valid source of truth about the matters of fact in this specific matter? Where the film itself constitutes a contempt of court for repeating a libel he had been found guilty of, resulting in him being sentenced to 18 months in prison?
That is the "evidence" you bring?
I wouldn't even trust that any video meeting this description accurately represents the views of someone who is literally filmed speaking in it.
To quote another source:
But the founder of the English Defence League has been told he will face legal action after reposting a screenshot of a message from a mother claiming the youngster had bullied her daughter.
The mother later posted a message on Robinson’s page denying it was Jamal who had attacked her daughter.
The assorted list of crimes I just gave you, some of which threatened to set some rapists free without conviction.
Also some others I didn't mention, like libelling a journalist's partner by calling them a paedophile, something he later admitted was false. The journalist got this treatment from him after she had asked for his comment for a story she was writing about allegations that he had misused financial donations from his supporters. You know, silencing journalism, just like he accused the judicial system of doing, except he admitted using dishonesty to try to get silence, and was also seen to be dishonest with the libellous statements.
Lots of examples of him being less than honest — mortgage fraud, using someone else's passport, listing "Ireland" on his Irish passport — so why do you trust his take on anything?
> You want to treat a video created and edited by the person who lost a libel case in this specific matter, as a valid source of truth about the matters of fact in this specific matter?
As I said, the documentary contains the interview with the girl Jamal Hijazi hit in her spine with a hockey stick starts at 21:49, and is followed by discussions with staff at the school, a student he spat at, other staff discussing him knocking a kid out by throwing him against a wall, school records of him bringing a knife and screwdriver to school, photos of the other girl he hit from text messages with the girl’s mother, an interview with the head teacher of the time about Jamal Hijazi bullying other children.
You don't have to believe Robinson, you can believe everyone else. I haven't read the rest of your comment as you haven't bothered to read mine, so there's little point.
The sentiment behind your comment has merit, but the content and style are inflammatory and count as flamebait, which is why the comment has been flagged and killed.
HN intended purpose is curious conversation, and phrases like this are not consistent with that ideal:
> I'd challenge someone to provide
> It's disturbing how indoctrinated in ... thought
> if you think ... you are truly indoctrinated
Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Your comment history shows no evidence of a willingness to engage in a fair debate, and you constantly create straw-man arguments, even in this very comment.
> I'd challenge someone to provide competing articles on a controversion topic from Wikipedia and Grokipedia and demonstrate how the Grok version is less-factual. Just because it doesn't adhere to your ideology, doesn't mean it's wrong.
Yeah, it's too soon to be making claims about misinformation campaigns. The Grokpedia approach should be on the same footing as Wikipedia was when it was launched.
Use it cautiously and wait for the apples-to-apples comparisons to come out.
I suspect your 2nd paragraph will be less well received here.
> Can anyone give a coherent explanation of why the intention behind Grokipedia is... bad?
If one takes Musk at his word that his only intention is to provide an alternative Wikipedia, there is no problem; it is simply an alternative Wikipedia with a different editorial bias. If one believes that Musk is the modern day Joseph Goebbels, then his stated intention is likely false; Goebbels' strategy was to provide 60% truths and 40% lies, which is expressly facilitated with something like Wikipedia (Grokipedia in Musk's case). There are many possibilities in between the two which seem to suggest the likely fallibility of Grokipedia. All things considered, especially Musk's track record with the truth, it is reasonably assumed that this is a propaganda tool more than an education tool.
Please remember that you asked for "a coherent explanation" rather than something you will necessarily agree with. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who believes the opinions in this explanation.
"an alternative Wikipedia with a different editorial bias"
I think the stated goal is to reduce bias, not to just rotate it to another view. Of course some things are difficult to reduce to facts, but plenty of others are not.
There is an objective truth, but many people know it by the alternative name "left-wing bias". You see the problem? (Or, if you prefer, pretend I wrote "right-wing bias")
Flat earth may be a better example, since everyone HN user is hopefully a round-earther. Suppose you are talking to someone who thinks the earth is flat. Flat-earth belief used to be a joke, one or two decades ago, but now these debates actually happen with some regularity and the round-earther never wins. Do you think you could do better than every other round-earther? The proverb about playing chess with a pigeon is relevant here. What you call "objective reality", they all "round-earth bias".
> You're saying there is no objective truth, and there is not point in trying for it?
Not exactly but kinda. I'd like to think it's less nihilistic than this makes it sound, at least. Here's a definition which I think is a good working one:
> A preference or an inclination, especially one that inhibits impartial judgment.
To attempt to answer the question directly, there is still agreed truth, such as in the practice of law where a judge decides what facts are relevant to the case. In that context, the legal framework is, barring appeals, simply to accept the judge's "truth"; at least, once they've made their decision. To prevent that from devolving into madness, we train lawyers and judges to understand the meaning of certain legal terms so that they all have a similar understanding and can argue using terms which have an agreed-upon meaning. Still, there is much bias in this. If there wasn't, there would be no need for lawyers. The closest thing we get to objective truth is something like 1 + 1 = 2, but it's still agreed truth.
There are facts, but even the reporting of facts can be biased. Which facts you report, the context in which they're reported, the details that are included, the order in which they're reported. These choices have an effect on how the facts are interpreted; they are a bias. If I want to say, "The sky is blue and the Blue Man Group are entertainers," but you want to say, "Mars is called the red planet and Mars Attacks! is a movie," who is being less biased? Is a news article that reports, "Mars is called the red planet and the sky is blue," more or less biased than either of the other statements? Is one more objective than the other? How come the author didn't mention the tall smurfs if they're unbiased? Surely reporters aren't required to report all of the facts in every instance. How do they, unbiased, decide which facts are relevant to their report?
With the idea of "reducing bias", it is obvious that in order to verify that bias has been reduced, one must accurately measure "how much" bias there is. So how do you do that? Further, how do you do it in an unbiased way? How do you even know if you're doing it in an unbiased way without an unbiased measurement?
Another way to think about it is in terms of opinions. How do you express an opinion without bias? How do you express the same opinion with less or more bias? Is, "I don't care," less biased than, "I care a lot."? Is, "This makes me angry," more biased than, "I'm indifferent to this."? I would say they're equally biased. At least, I can't come up with a good reason to claim that indifference is not a bias. So, neutrality is a bias. I'm not sure what isn't a bias. I guess a bare fact. But, again, that doesn't mean the presentation of a fact is not without bias.
To give an example, it is a fact that Donald Trump is serving his second term as President. Do people often present that fact without bias? It's also a fact that Donald Trump has not served two consecutive terms as President. Is that presented without bias? Both of those decisions are biased: minimally, why would one present either of these facts in a given context?
Or an example of indifference: if someone says, "I don't care about Biden's capability to serve as President," does their indifference suggest a lack of bias? Is it more or less biased than, "I think it's bad that Biden is President given his apparent senility."? Is it more or less biased than, "I think it's good that Biden is President given his apparent senility."?
Biases are simply different or the same, neither lesser nor greater. I don't know how I could even go about measuring bias without introducing bias.
How was my comment hateful? The far right is as indoctrinated as the far right. But I think most liberals don't realize how much of media is left-leaning.
I think "hateful" was unfair (it's against the guidelines to use words like that, no matter what it's responding to), but it was inflammatory, hence these replies. The very best kind of HN comment is one that presents a position many may be predisposed to disagree with, without activating charged reactions, and hopefully inspiring a few people to rethink things a little.
Because you present something unproven and opaque against something proven and transparent and you want "them" to provide you with something you can't produce yourself. Every engagement with your initial comment would end in straw men arguments of your side. Even if you believe wikipedia is left-leaning I can still look at the battleground of the discussion behind the article. I don't see a feature like this on grokipedia. Your comment is ragebait aimed at one side of the discussion with rhetoric that's used by the other side. I am glad you only disputed the hateful in my initial comment because your bias is blinding.
It's not just Musk, of course; many people in his political realm do the same. You misunderstand what they're doing, which is why they're so successful and 'get away with it' endlessly. It looks like something you expect, but you're losing the game because you aren't even aware you're on the field playing. You'll notice their followers laugh about 'owning' you - what do they mean?
To the (neo-reactionaries), words are weapons and not conveyers of information. Extreme statements are, in many cases, better weapons than accurate ones, certainly better than moderate ones - they sieze the initiative, put the speaker on offense, put their opponent on their heels because the words are so unexpected and aggressive.
To people who think the words convey information, the words and behavior make no sense. You think you're having a political debate, but they are fighting a war to destroy you. It's like you listening to their signal, trying to decode what makes no sense, when they are really trying to electrocute you.
In a sense I don't fault people for not grokking that (ha ha) but I do fault them for seeing something is wrong, for all these years, and not making the intellectual effort to figure it out. It seems like almost nobody, national and world leaders and leading intellectuals included, has figured it out.
Of course, but at least one of the mechanisms by which those weapons work is to increase the number of people in society with a completely broken epistemology; i.e. they want to make more people stupid, because stupid people could go along with anything.
The article isn't claiming Wikipedia is perfect - it argues that Grokipedia is intentionally deceptive. There’s a difference between flawed and weaponized.
Wikipedia is flawed, weaponized, and *intentionally* deceptive, with a myriad of articles locked down and editorialized by authors to fit their specific worldview, refusing to add information or even links to approved sources if it contradicts their narrative.
The refusal to mention "federally named Gulf of America in the US" in the lede for the Gulf of Mexico (with the Talk page growing ad infinitum with blatantly negative commentary for the president until it was finally purged and locked), the refusal to name the alleged killer Karmelo Anthony in the killing of Austin Metcalf, the attempted deletion of the article for the killing of Iryna Zarutska, overemphasis on Charlie Kirk as "far-right" and a "conspiracy theorist", keeping the title "GamerGate (harassment campaign)" and purposely refusing any mention for what triggered it and motivations involved, instead hyperfocusing on victimizing journalists involved, etc.
Another interesting comparison is the Wikipedia and Grokipedia pages for Imane Khelif. The former intentionally omits sources that don't fit the controlling editors' worldview, as the Talk page shows. Whereas the latter is a lot more balanced and discusses the controversy, with a full range of sources, rather than picking a side.
'Coup Against Reality Itself' seems a bit of an over reaction to Musk's attempt to do a slightly less woke version of Wikipedia. If you try reading it, it's not terrible. It waffles on a bit in the usual LLM fashion.
Most of it is just generic slop, you have to find the specific pages that interest Musk where he has clearly stuck his finger on the scales to make it say what he wants.
people on the autism spectrum are amazingly good at what they're good at and spectacularly bad at what they're bad at. I wish Musk would just stick to what he's good at like SpaceX and Tesla etc.
As an ex Tesla owner, I am amused by the idea that anyone thinks that Musk was "good" at running Tesla. Those cars are cheaply and shoddily made, and have probably the worst service experience in the industry.
It's my understanding that Musk has only minimal influence on SpaceX.
Edit: I would like to repeat the point that I owned one, for four years, during which it had to go in for service 12 times, four of which were "car is completely dead". And almost every time I had to fight for service. Every Tesla owner I ever spoke in person to described a similar experience. It's funny how online, the message is very different.
Talk about a coup against reality. Pay the man his due. Tesla produce very competitive EVs. He has been instrumental in the success of SpaceX and Tesla.
Insofar as Tesla has survived at all, I think there's a case to be made that it has been "successful". Challenging the "big three" auto manufacturers usually ends in failure or buyout.
To be fair, the one thing Musk has going for him is bringing funding to opportunities and making the most of it.
I wouldn't say that Musk is the only person who could have brought SpaceX and Tesla to where there are now, and certainly there are many individuals who contributed heavily to get them there. That being said, not many people have the money and interest to do it.
Bezos had the money and opportunity to do the same as SpaceX but hasn't been even remotely as successful. He technically started Blue Origin first, but wasted several years not taking it seriously as a rocket company; back then it was basically just a space-themed club for him and his friends (Neal Stephenson, etc.) SpaceX went balls to the walls and never let up. The day to day operations are run by Shotwell and she deserves enormous credit, but we shouldn't ignore the role Elon played in recognizing her potential, keeping her happy and letting her do her job (usually) not getting in her way. And a lot of the dreamer stuff, all the Mars colonization and Starship stuff, has Musk's fingerprints all over it. Granted, none of that stuff has actually happened or worked, but it has clearly been good for helping SpaceX recruit highly motivated talent. If you're a young aerospace engineer with something to prove in 2010, which company do you go to? The one that is sending stuff to the space station and talking about putting people on Mars? Or the one that hasn't publicly done anything and doesn't talk about anything either? SpaceX was run extremely well compared to Blue Origin, not just in terms of day to day management but also their big picture strategy.
The next administration (if there is one) should force Musk to take random drug tests and revoke his ability to run SpaceX on failure. I think we'd get to the bottom of what's going on rather quickly if he didn't have the opportunity to cheat on them.
I’m sure there could be some argument to be made for obstruction of justice considering he oversaw the firing/dissolution of agencies and people investigating his dealings. Plus wherever those investigations lead.
That has not been my experience with them at all. I've done nearly quarter of a million miles in various Teslas and never had a serious issue. My service experience with them has also been lightyears ahead of the traditional manufacturers.
Musk was definitely good at running Tesla for what matters for a company: making money.
I suspect that just as with SpaceX, he shows off more than he does actual work. He is well known for taking credit for other people work, but you can't deny that he takes credit (and money) for the work of the right people, and it has value!
As for the cars themselves, Tesla is usually in the middle of the pack, with the Japanese on top and Americans at the bottom, making Tesla rather good for an American car brand. All that to say, nothing special on the reliability side, except that people talk a lot about Tesla in one way or another. You probably got unlucky while the people contradicting you got lucky.
There is no organization on Earth, private or government, which is better at the launch business than SpaceX. And it wasn't handed to him, he had to sue the government and go up against entrenched contractors with decades of experience.
Cars… not great, but good enough to turn Tesla from a joke into an OK company selling in a "Blue Ocean"* market. Which isn't nothing, but then a bunch of other electric car companies popped up and now Tesla cars are solidly B-tier… well, except for the Cybertruck which is just a flop.
Musk’s ability to attract talent and capital is undeniable - but it’s not unmatched, and it comes at a cost. Innovation driven by charisma and chaos isn’t sustainable, especially when it veers into ideological distortion.
Interesting that a neutral submission for the launch of and direct link to Grokipedia was just flagged [1] while this highly sensationalized news article goes up after
I'm not a fan of Elon or whatever, but I agree with the parent. "Grokipedia by xAI has just launched with 885,279 articles" does not seem like a title that should be flagged.
I'm working on building a social media site that wants to improve on moderation and I've found the case of the Grokipedia curious. So I'd love to get in touch with your but didn't find any details in your bio. Please reach out to me and let's do a user interview (can be via email too). My contacts are in my bio
The submission is titled "Grokipedia by xAI has just launched with 885,279 articles" and is just a direct link to Grokipedia. It is quite literally the most neutral, non-editorialized submission to HN.
Show HN: A big batch of AI Slop & Propaganda Elon Musk did all by himself and no one else but him because he is the number one business man and "World's Best Genius™"
Did you read any of the comments in the thread? It's not done in good faith and it looks like they should have turned the dial more toward "quality" than "quantity". A stable with lots of manure isn't inherently better than a stable with less manure.
I think the comments in this thread bandwagoning the knee-jerk hate against Elon Musk put forth by the submission are a lot more bad faith and vitriolic than in the other submission.
I'm not even particularly fond of the man but this is childish behavior.
>> This is the construction of a reality production cartel that creates a parallel information ecosystem designed to codify a deeply partisan, far-right worldview as objective fact.
Perhaps if Wikipedia hadn't drifted so far left (on culture war topics, it's fine for science etc), then maybe it wouldn't have been necessary.
You can't reason with fascists so the 'but they say things I agree with sometimes' is irrelevant. Either you keep pushing them out of public spaces and undermine their ability to organise regardless of whether they manage to say something innocuous or dress nicely for once, or you're at best lacking in knowledge about how the movement functions but more likely a sympathiser.
Sanger has been voicing politically motivated antipathy towards Wikipedia for a quarter of a century or so, and worked for competing projects for most of that time. This includes supporting far-right nasties like The Heritage Foundation.
No, there are many other political movements I also disagree with, for example the broader reactionary tendency, including conservatives and neo-liberal groups.
Commonly I also disagree with people on ethical or religious grounds. For example I vehemently disagree with most protestants on the issue of capitalism which they consider compatible with the teachings of the biblical Jesus, and I while I agree with many catholics on this same issue I disagree with church mediated caritas as the social solution.
Frankly, I think you're the one that mostly comes across as scared here.
What am I scared of? I'm concerned for your grip on reality if you think a free market think tank is a bunch of fascists. That's about as factual as me calling Obama a communist.
Fascism is capitalism violently colonising its home turf, there is no conflict between a group calling itself a "free market think tank" and being part of a fascist movement or tendency.
Obama is quite pro-capitalism and hence much closer to fascism than any leftist position. As a politician he also invested heavily in and innovated deceitful application of violent force, mostly abroad, but kind of rolled out the carpet for it to turn explicitly fascist by 'boomeranging' back home.
I suspect insights like these frighten you, because they would force you to reevaluate your identities and place in society.
Not really. What other political tendencies perform violent colonisation at home?
And, well, yeah, they have a lot of similarities. They both agree on things like 'Arbeit macht Frei', extremely violent punishment of petty crime and industrial futurism regarding e.g. unrestrained extractive energy exploitation and so on. It's harder to figure out but it seems to me that the Manhattan Institute agrees with Hitler on the jewish question, jews need to be removed from 'white' societies, but disagrees with immediate industrial extermination and rather opts for the more palatable solution of having them migrate to and serve a colony. I.e. the kind of Madagascar plan that mainstream zionism amounts to, though it targets Palestine instead of the island.
They don't deserve a single iota of respect, are a total joke & nightmare for the world, feeding lies and disinformation to the world. Would be plutocrats Koch Brothers, Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, Chris twitter-poster-shit-show-freaking Rufo?! A whose who of extreme conservatives eager to get us back to the 1850's. Here's some sites from about covering them, in gentle neutral terms, but Manhanttan Institute absolutely deserve more serious lambasting & being laughed out of any polite company. Ad hominem maybe, but absolutely people working in opposition to a better world, trying to drag us into a corporate controlled hell world, and deserving of no regards.
It's just hilarious that there's one dude who is the lightning rod for right-wing hatred. Like, it's one dude! It's so unclear what he does that is so menacing to the right: there's seemingly a fact free desperation to have some big bad rich guy on the left's side doing so much.
Because the right has 99% of the big bad evil dudes. Manhattan Institute is one of dozens of identical (ok not every pit has a king cobra FedSoc Leonard Leo) billionaire funded pits of world burning vipers. The E1 Global Elite class aka the barbarians (https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...) are not the richest people by being liberal or nice or progressive. They're where they are because they are right wing people who (in right wing style) don't give half a fig about anyone else or much besides their bottom line and power.
I find it so beyond pathetic that George Soros is parroted around as some incredible omni-present mastermind of the left. But the right's favorite tactic is projection, is the classic "Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it" "Paint one's self as being the defender of the very thing you are aiming to destroy." Neither of these has any respect for reality or facts: they are what the right radically embraces: flooding the zone with shit. Not respecting reality. Sowing confusion. It's just so pathetic that such a mild mannered decent dude as Soros is the best cope ya'll could come up with for a boogeyman: quaking in your boots, at this guy? For reals.
Please don't introduce flamebait like this on HN. Context about the author's background can be helpful, but "spreading hate", along with the whole tone of the comment, is inflammatory rhetoric of the kind we're trying to avoid here.
Unsurprising. I just quickly read through the Wiki and the Groki articles on "transgender" and they are entirely different, and the author certainly wouldn't appreciate the latter.
The wikipedia article presents the entire thing as fact without any critique or controversy somehow (funnily enough the authors BlueSky page proudly shares a Star Wars quote: "The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil...") While the grok article is just an AI wall of shit that somehow treads totally different ground.
What a dumb time to be alive.
Was the user mistaken or just anti trans? Were you correcting a mistake or asserting your/Caraballo's opinion?
It just struck me that the word has no meaning now is all.
I'm not sure what you mean. I know we couldn't agree to eliminate the human rights, including the most basic self-determination, of anyone - trans, cis-norm WASP male, progressive, fascist, or otherwise.
Makes me think Grok is also parsing the history and selectively leaving out edits in order to produce a result with the "correct" bias.