Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to…
Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions.
On Bray · My 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.
Speaking as a leading but highly biased expert on the subject of T. Bray, here are the key take-aways:
(Overly) complete · It covers all the territory; there is no phase of my life’s activity that could possibly be encountered in combing the Web that is not exhaustively covered. In theory this should be good but in fact, who cares about the details of what I worked on at Sun Microsystems between 2004 and 2010? I suppose I should but, like I said, I couldn’t force myself to plod all the way through it.
Wrong · Every paragraph contains significant errors. Sometimes the text is explicitly self-contradictory on the face of it, sometimes the mistakes are subtle enough that only I would spot them.
Style · The writing has that LLM view-from-nowhere flat-affect semi-academic flavor. I don’t like it but the evidence suggests that some people do?
References · All the references are just URLs and at least some of them entirely fail to support the text. Here’s an example. In discussion of my expert-witness work for the FTC in their litigation against Meta concerning its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, Grokipedia says:
[Bray] opined that users' perceptions of response times in online services critically influence market dynamics.
It cites Federal Trade Commission’s Reply to Meta Platforms, Inc.’s Response to Federal Trade Commission’s Counterstatement of Material Facts (warning: 2,857-page PDF). Okay, that was one of the things I argued, but the 425 pages of court documents that I filed, and the references to my reporting in the monster document, make it clear that it was one tiny subset of the main argument.
Anyhow, I (so that you won’t have to) spent a solid fifteen minutes spelunking back and forth through that FTC doc, looking for strings like “response time” and “latency” and so on. Maybe somewhere in those pages there’s support for the claim quoted above, but I couldn’t find it.
Useful? · Wikipedia, in my mind, has two main purposes: A quick visit to find out the basics about some city or person or plant or whatever, or a deep-dive to find out what we really know about genetic linkages to autism or Bach’s relationship with Frederick the Great or whatever.
At the moment, Grokipedia doesn’t really serve either purpose very well. But, after all, this is release 0.1, maybe we should give it a chance.
Or, maybe not.
Woke/Anti-Woke · The whole point, one gathers, is to provide an antidote to Wikipedia’s alleged woke bias. So I dug into that. Let’s consider three examples of what I found. First, from that same paragraph about the FTC opinion quoted above:
While Bray and aligned progressives contend that such dominance stifles innovation by enabling predatory acquisitions and reduced rivalry—evidenced by fewer startup exits in concentrated sectors—counterarguments highlight that Big Tech's scale has fueled empirical gains, with these firms investing over $240 billion in U.S. R&D in 2024 (more than a quarter of national totals) and driving AI, cloud, and patent surges.[128] [131] Six tech industries alone accounted for over one-third of U.S. GDP growth from 2012–2021, comprising about 9% of the economy and sustaining 9.3 million jobs amid falling consumer prices and rapid technological diffusion. [132] [133] Right-leaning economists often defend consumer welfare metrics and market self-correction, warning that forced divestitures risk eroding the efficiencies and investment incentives that have propelled sector productivity above 6% annual growth in key areas like durable manufacturing tech. [134] [135]
I’ve linked the numbered citations to the indicated URLs. Maybe visit one or two of them and see what you think? Four are to articles arguing, basically, that monopolies must be OK because the companies accused of it are growing really fast and driving the economy. They seem mostly to be from right-wing think-tanks but I guess that’s what those think-tanks are for. One of them, #131, Big Tech and the US Digital-Military-Industrial Complex, I think isn’t helpful to the argument at all. But still, it’s broadly doing what they advertise: Pushing back against “woke” positions, in this case the position that monopolization is bad.
I looked at a couple of other examples. For example, this is from the header of the Greta Thunberg article:
While credited with elevating youth engagement on environmental issues, Thunberg's promotion of urgent, existential climate threats has drawn scrutiny for diverging from nuanced empirical assessments of climate risks and adaptation capacities, as well as for extending her activism into broader political arenas such as anti-capitalist and geopolitical protests.[5][6]
Somehow I feel no urge to click on those citation links.
If Ms Thunberg is out there on the “woke” end of the spectrum, let’s flit over to the other end, namely the entry for J.D. Vance, on the subject of his book Hillbilly Elegy.
Critics from progressive outlets, including Sarah Smarsh in her 2018 book Heartland, faulted the memoir for overemphasizing personal and cultural failings at the expense of structural economic policies, arguing it perpetuated stereotypes of rural whites as self-sabotaging.[71] These objections, often rooted in institutional analyses from academia and media, overlooked data on behavioral patterns like opioid dependency rates—peaking at 21.5 deaths per 100,000 in Appalachia around 2016—that aligned with Vance's observations of "deaths of despair" precursors.[72]
I read and enjoyed Heartland but the citation is to a New Yorker article that doesn’t mention Smarsh. As for the second sentence… my first reaction as I trudged through its many clauses, was “life’s too short”. But seriously, opioid-death statistics weaken the hypothesis about structural economic issues? Don’t get it.
Take-away · Wikipedia is, to quote myself, the encyclopedia that “anyone who’s willing to provide citations can edit”. Grokipedia is “the encyclopedia that Elon Musk’s LLM can edit, with sketchy citations and no progressive argument left un-attacked.”
So I guess it’s Working As Intended?
Read the original article
Comments
By hocuspocus 2025-10-3122:403 reply I checked a topic I care about, and that I have personally researched because the publicly available information is pretty bad.
The article is even worse than the one on Wikipedia. It follows the same structure but fails to tell a coherent story. It references random people on Reddit (!) that don't even support the point it's trying to make. Not that the information on Reddit is particularly good to begin with, even it it were properly interpreted. It cites Forbes articles parroting pretty insane and unsubstantiated claims, I thought mainstream media was not to be trusted?
In the end it's longer, written in a weird style, and doesn't really bring any value. Asking Grok about about the same topic and instructing it to be succinct yields much better results.
By frm88 2025-11-015:01 I wrote about an entry on Sri Lanka a couple of days ago [0] where I checked grok's source reference (factsanddetails.com) against scamdetector which gave it a 38.4 score on a 100 trustworthiness scale. Today that score is 12.2. Every entry in grokipedia that covers topics vaguely Asian has a reference to factsanddetails.com. You can check for yourself: just search for it on grokipedia - it'll come up with worth 601 pages of results.
Today the page I linked in my HN post is completely gone.
But worse: yesterday tumblr user sophieinwonderland found that they were quoted as a source on Multiplicity [1]. Tumblr is definitely not a reliable source and I don't mean to throw shade on sophieinwonderland who might very well be an expert on that topic.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743033
[1] https://www.tumblr.com/sophieinwonderland/798920803075883008...
By jaredklewis 2025-10-3122:42 What’s the article?
It was just launched? I remember when Wikipedia was pretty useless early on. The concept of using an LLM to take a ton of information and distill it down into encyclopedia form seems promising with iteration and refinement. If they add in an editor step to clean things up, that would likely help a lot (not sure if maybe they already do this)
Nothing about that seems promising! The one single thing you want from an Encyclopedia is compressing factual information into high-density overviews. You need to be able to trust the article to be faithful to its sources. Wikipedia mods are super anal about that, and for good reason! Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? You can never trust it to be faithful with the sources. On Wikipedia, at least there’s lots of people checking on each other. There are no such guardrails for an LLM. You would need to trust a single publisher with a technology that’s allowing them to crank out millions of entries and updates permanently, so fast that you could never detect subtle changes or errors or biases targeted in a specific way—and that doesn’t even account for most people, who never even bother to question an article, let alone check the sources.
If there ever was a tool suited just perfectly for mass manipulation, it’s an LLM-written collection of all human knowledge, controlled by a clever, cynical, and misanthropic asshole with a god complex.
> Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? You can never trust it to be faithful with the sources.
Isn’t summarization precisely one of the biggest values people are getting from AI models?
What prevents one from mitigating hallucination problems with editors as I mentioned? Are there not other ways you can think of this might be mitigated?
> You would need to trust a single publisher with a technology that’s allowing them to crank out millions of entries and updates permanently, so fast that you could never detect subtle changes or errors or biases targeted in a specific way—and that doesn’t even account for most people, who never even bother to question an article, let alone check the sources.
How is this different from Wikipedia already? It seems that if the frequency of additions/changes is really a problem, you can slow this down. Wikipedia doesn’t just automatically let every edit take place without bots and humans reviewing changes
By LexiMax 2025-11-016:41 > Isn’t summarization precisely one of the biggest values people are getting from AI models?
If I want an AI summary of a Wikipedia article, I can just ask an AI and cut out the middle-man.
Not only that, once I've asked the AI to do so, I can do things like ask follow-up questions or ask it to expand on a particular detail. That's something you can't do with the copy-pasted output of an AI.
By madeofpalk 2025-11-011:331 reply It’s just a different class of problem.
Human editors making mistakes is more tractable than an LLM making a literally random guess (what’s the temperature for these articles?) at what to include?
I recall a similar argument made about why encyclopedias written by paid academics and experts were better than some randos editing Wikipedia. They’re probably still right about that but Wikipedia won for reasons beyond purely being another encyclopedia. And it didn’t turn out too bad as an encyclopedia either
By xg15 2025-11-0110:46 Yeah, but that act of "winning" was only possible because Wikipedia raised its own standard by a lot and reined in the randos - by insisting on citing reliable sources, no original research, setting up a whole system of moderators and governance to determine what even counts as a "reliable source" etc.
By mixedump 2025-11-012:19 > If there ever was a tool suited just perfectly for mass manipulation, it’s an LLM-written collection of all human knowledge, controlled by a clever, cynical, and misanthropic asshole with a god complex.
It’s painful to watch how many people (a critical mass) don’t understand this — and how dangerous it is. When you combine that potential, if not likely, outcome with the fact that people are trained or manipulated into an “us vs. them” way of thinking, any sensible discussion point that lies somewhere in between, or any perspective that isn’t “I’m cheering for my own team no matter what,” gets absorbed into that same destructive thought process and style of discourse.
In the end, this leads nowhere — which is extremely dangerous. It creates nothing but “useful idiot”–style implicit compliance, hidden behind a self-perceived sense of “deep thinking” or “seeing the truth that the idiots on the other side just don’t get.” That mindset is the perfect mechanism — one that feeds the perfect enemy: the human ego — to make followers obey and keep following “leaders” who are merely pushing their own interests and agendas, even as people inflict damage on themselves.
This dynamic ties into other psychological mechanisms beyond the ego trap (e.g., the sunk cost fallacy), easily keeping people stuck indefinitely on the same self-destructive path — endangering societies and the future itself.
Maybe, eventually, humanity will figure out how to deal with this — with the overwhelming information overload, the rise of efficient bots, and other powerful, scalable manipulation tools now available to both good and bad actors across governments and the private sector. We are built for survival — but that doesn’t make the situation any less concerning.
It really isn't a promising idea at all. Llms arem't "there" yet with respect to this sort of thing. Having an editor is totally infeasible, at that point you might as well have the humans write the articles.
> Llms arem't "there" yet with respect to this sort of thing
Yes, nothing about this is “there yet” which was my point
> Having an editor is totally infeasible, at that point you might as well have the humans write the articles.
Why?
For the same reason you don't modify autogenerated files in your source code base. It's easy to get an LLM to just regen the page but once someone tries to edit it you're even farther down the road of what an LLM can't do right now. I wouldn't even trust it to follow one edit instruction, at scale, at that size of document, and if we're going to have humans trying to make multiple edits while the LLM is folding in its own improvements... yeah, the LLMs aren't even remotely ready for that at this point.
By jameslk 2025-11-011:21 That’s a good point. I think it’s a similar problem of why you wouldn’t let a model go wild in your codebase though. If good solutions to how we handle AI models making code changes are found, it seems reasonable to expect they also may be applicable here
There's a significant difference between a site being useless because it just doesn't have the breadth yet to cover the topic you're looking for (as in early Wikipedia); versus a site being useless by not actually having facts about the topic you're looking for, yet spouting out authoritative-looking nonsense anyway.
> versus a site being useless by not actually having facts about the topic you're looking for, yet spouting out authoritative-looking nonsense anyway.
You just described Wikipedia early on before it had much content, rules around weasel words, original research, etc
By LexiMax 2025-11-016:34 Wikipedia early on wasn't competing against Wikipedia, it was competing against hardcover encyclopedias. There was clear value-add from being able to draw from a wider range of human expertise and update on a quicker cadence.
In a world where Wikipedia already exists, there's no similar value-add to Grokipedia. Not only is it useless today, there is nothing about the fundamental design of the site that would lead me to believe that it has any path to being more authoritative or accurate than Wikipedia in the future - ever.
Maybe it's just me, but reading through LLM generated prose becomes a drag very quickly. The em dashes sprinkled everywhere, the "it's not this, it's that" style of writing. I even tried listening to it and it's still exhausting. Maybe it's the ubiquity of it nowadays that is making me jaded, but I tend to appreciate terrible writing, like I'm doing in this comment, more nowadays.
I find the Grokipedia writing especially a drag. I don't think it's em dashes and similar so much as the ideas not being clear. In good writing the writer normally has a clear idea in mind and is communicating it but the Grokipedia writing is kind of a waffley mess. I guess maybe because LLMs don't have much of an idea in mind so much as stringing words together.
By madeofpalk 2025-11-012:06 It’s right there in the seconds paragraph of the article:
> My Grokipedia entry has over seven thousand words, compared to a mere 1,300 in my Wikipedia article
By andrewflnr 2025-11-012:02 > I tend to appreciate terrible writing, like I'm doing in this comment, more nowadays.
Nah dude, what you're describing from LLMs is terrible writing. Just because it has good grammar and punctuation doesn't make it good, for exactly the reasons you listed. Good writing pulls you through.
By jhanschoo 2025-11-015:45 I'm fine with Gemini's tone as I'm reading for information and argumentation, and Gemini's prose is quite clear. I prefer its style and tone over OpenAI's which seems more inclined to punchy soundbites. I don't use Claude enough for general purpose information to have an opinion on it.
By ajross 2025-10-3122:47 I completely agree. There's an "obsequious verbosity" to these things, like they're trying to convince you they they're not bullshitting. But that seems like a tuning issue (you can obviously get an LLM to emit prose in any style you want), and my guess is that this result has been extensively A/B tested to be more comforting or something.
One of the skills of working with the form, which I'm still developing, is the ability to frame follow-on questions in a specific enough way to prevent the BS engine from engaging. Sometimes I find myself asking it questions using jargon I 100% know is wrong just because the answer will tell me what the phrasing it wants to hear is.
By generationP 2025-10-3122:174 reply Wondering if the project will get better from the pushback or will just be folded like one of Elon's many ADHD experiments. In a sense, encyclopedias should be easy for LLMs: they are meant to survey and summarize well-documented material rather than contain novel insights; they are often imprecise and muddled already (look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree and see how many conventions coexist without an explanation of their differences; it used to be worse a few years ago); the writing style is pretty much that of GPT-5. But the problem type of "summarize a biased source and try to remove the bias" isn't among the ones I've seen LLMs being tested for, and this is what Elon's project lives and dies by.
If I were doing a project like this, I would hire a few dozen topical experts to go over the WP articles relevant to their fields and comment on their biases rather than waste their time rewriting the articles from scratch. The results can then be published as a study, and can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up, without needlessly duplicating the 90% of the work that it has been doing well.
Bray brought up a really good point. The Grokipedia entry on him was several times the length of his Wikipedia entry, not just because Grok's writing style is verbose, but also because it went into exhaustive detail on insignificant parts of his life simply because the sources were online. My own brief browsings of Grokipedia have left me with the same impression. The current iteration of Grokipedia, besides being untrustworthy, wastes a lot of time beating around the bush and, frequently, off into the weeds.
Just as LLM's lack the capacity for basic logic, they also lack the kind of judgment required to pare down a topic to what is of interest to humans. I don't know if this is an insurmountable shortcoming of LLM's, but it certainly seems to be a brick wall for the current bunch.
-------------
The technology to make Grokipedia work isn't there yet. However, my real concern is the problem Grokipedia is intended to solve: Musk wants his own version of Wikipedia, with a political slant of his liking, and without any pesky human authors. He also clearly wants Wikipedia taken down[1]. This is reality control for billionaires.
Perhaps LLM generated encyclopedias could be useful, but what Musk is trying to do makes it absolutely clear that we will need to continue carefully evaluating any sources we use for bias. If Musk wants to reframe the sum of human knowledge because he doesn't like being called out for his sieg heils, only a fool would place any trust in the result.
[1]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-elon...
By morkalork 2025-11-011:11 >reality control for billionaires
Not to beat a dead horse, but one really could wake up one day and find out we've always been at war with Oceana after the flip of a switch in an LLM encyclopedia.
> can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up
what if your goal is for wikipedia to be biased in your favor?
No no no, you see, you got it all wrong. If the Wikipedia article on, let’s say, transsexualism, says that’s an orientation, not a disease—then that’s leftist bias. Removing that bias means correcting it to say it’s a mental illness, obviously. That makes the article unbiased, pure truth.
Any condition which causes the individual to self-sterilize or not have progeny is maladaptive from an evolutionary perspective. Some traits like sickle cell adaptive against malaria, but those who are homozygous suffer from the disease of sickle cell anemia. I struggle to imagine how trans is adaptive in any way, seems to only cause problems. The leftist narrative is that such individuals must engage in costly medical procedures to avoid committing suicide, so by their own framing they basically consider it a mental disease.
By JetSpiegel 2025-11-0110:26 So, are monks and nuns mentally ill?
Any condition that causes men to be so sex-starved, they take it out on kids is maladaptative, and yet it hasn't abated for millenia.
By LexiMax 2025-11-016:49 It is quite common to freeze sperm before starting HRT or surgeries.
It only seems to be a problem for bigots like you. Trans folks just want to live their lives. Why can’t you leave them the fuck alone?
If that's the case, why are they doing things like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxwv9njvlgo
If bullying and harassing women is how they "live their lives" then this needs to be stopped.
You can’t hold an entire group of people responsible for the actions of a few extremists, unless you want to stop Christians and Muslims as well. And don’t get me started on all the shit men pull off worldwide, yet I don’t see you rallying against heterosexuality?
By yappen 2025-11-0113:15 This is the more extreme end of the scale of a general pattern of harassing women for saying "no". Whether that be "no you're not a woman" or "no you're not a lesbian" or "no you can't come in here it's female-only".
At least most Christians and Muslims accept that others don't believe in their religion and, for the most part, don't force them to act as if they do.
By relaxing 2025-11-011:51 An encyclopedia article is already an exercise in survey-and-summarize.
Asking an LLM to reprocess it again is only going to add error.
By spankibalt 2025-10-3123:061 reply > "If I were doing a project like this, I would hire a few dozen topical experts to go over the WP articles relevant to their fields and comment on their biases [...] The results can then be published as a study, and can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up [...]"
One thing I love about the Wikipedias (plural, as they're all different orgs): anyone "in the know" can very quickly tell who's got no practical knowledge of Wikipedia's structure, rules, customs, and practices to begin with. What you're proposing like it's some sort of Big Beautiful Idea has already been done countless times, is being done, and will be done for as long as Wikis exist.
And Groggypedia? It's nothing more but a pathetic vanity project of an equally pathetic manbaby for people who think LLM-slop continously fine-tuned to reflect the bias of their guru, and the tool's owner, is a Seal of Quality.
By generationP 2025-10-3123:341 reply Don't forget that public opinion and the media landscape are quite different in 2025 from what they were in the 2010s when most prior studies on WP bias have been written. Sufficiently pertinent (sadly this isn't synonymous with high quality) conservative and anti-woke content can reach wide audiences, particularly when Elon puts his thumb on the scale. Besides, to my knowledge, none of the prior attempts at studying WP bias has even tried to make a big enough fuss to change said bias; the final outcomes of the studies were conference papers.
By spankibalt 2025-11-010:211 reply > "[...] conservative and anti-woke content can reach wide audiences, particularly when Elon puts his thumb on the scale."
No shit; it's always been that way since mass media became a thing. Besides, there is no such thing as quality conservative and/or "anti-woke" media. The very concept represents a contradictio in adiecto. And Elon's just the modern version of an industrialist of yesteryear. Back in the day they owned the mass media of their time: radio and television. Today its "AI"-enshittified parasocial media and ideally the infrastructure that runs those dumps.
> "Don't forget that public opinion and the media landscape are quite different in 2025 from what they were in the 2010s when most prior studies on WP bias have been written."
Bias studies have been written since Wikipedia became a staple in hoi polloi's info diet. And there's always been a whole cottage industry of pathological and practised liars (e. g. the Heritage Foundation, amongst others) catering to right-wing grievance issues. The marked difference is that the right's attacks against Wikipedia as an institution are more aggressive since Trump... completely in line with the more aggressive attacks on human rights, reason, science, and democratic institutions on part of conservatives world wide.
By generationP 2025-11-012:251 reply Note that I've said "anti-woke content", not "anti-woke media". I am including the occasional "course correction" opeds and actually well-researched longreads you're seeing in places like NYT, Atlantic and such. Partisan outlets for partisan readers aren't doing the heavy lifting here, but the success of Substack and the unexpected survival of Twitter under Elon have convinced editors to listen. Elon's personality isn't of importance here; he mostly needs to just push a few buttons to make a sub-critical news item go super-critical.
By spankibalt 2025-11-014:14 > "Note that I've said 'anti-woke content', not 'anti-woke media'."
In the context of my argument a distinction without difference.
> "I am including the occasional "course correction" opeds and actually well-researched longreads you're seeing in places like NYT, Atlantic and such."
Well, that's the crux: There is no such thing for me as "actually well-researched anti-woke content". That's just a pathetic, and ultimately tragic, hallucination in the same vein as "actually well-researched" pieces of flat earthers, pushing their trash. Et cetera.
> "Elon's personality isn't of importance here [...]"
I can tell you're one of those guys who paid "actually a lot of" attention when The Cult of Personality was negotiated in the classroom.
