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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.
The word "verify" links to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ComparePa...

Makes me think Grok is also parsing the history and selectively leaving out edits in order to produce a result with the "correct" bias.



Slopipedia?


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:

https://grokipedia.com/page/Toroidal_propeller

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.


Is this political bias in the room with us right now?




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