No matter what else you might say about him, Elon Musk has the power to make *big* things happen: Tesla, Boring Company, SpaceX, Grok (more on which below) and now…Grokipedia. I didn’t list X because he didn’t create it; he just wrote checks.
If you recall, I started playing around with Grok earlier this year. My entry for March 28 shows a number of Grok replies when I asked, “Who is —-?” I asked about Carol, and my late godmother, Kathleen Duntemann 1920-1999. I asked about my sister, Gretchen Roper, but there is in fact another Gretchen Roper, who is a famous clarinetist. That exercise made me glad my last name isn’t Smith. Then I asked about…me. Who is Jeff Duntemann? You can read its reply here.
Fortunately for all of us, I’m not dead. I’m working hard on staying that way. The good news is that Grok is improving, and delivering fewer hallucinations than it was 7 or 8 months ago.
And now—ta daaa!—we have Grokipedia. It’s only a few days old and still at V0.1, so I won’t be too hard on it. As best I can tell, it’s a Grok-ish AI front end for a Wikipedia-ish encyclopedia. Musk claims he’s trying to remove political bias from Wikipedia’s articles that touch on politics. (Good luck with that, pilgrim.) On the other hand, he generally gets what he asks for and pays for.
Grokipedia’s home page displays a counter of its articles. As of a few minutes ago, it was 885,279. It also allows you to display Grokipedia screens in either light or dark mode. Some people like dark mode. I’ve seen too much typing paper in my life to abandon light mode, even though I spent years with text monitors painting ASCII and PC-specific glyphs on a black background. For my first round of tests, I just entered random names and concepts to see what Grokipedia would do. As I pretty much expected, the majority of its articles have a disclaimer at the bottom stating that the article was adapted from one on Wikipedia. This is legal; Musk could have grabbed the whole damn thing if he wanted to, and unless I misrecall, Wikipedia has about seven million articles in its catalog.
I’ll be watching the Grok article counter going forward. I can almost hear some major crunching in the background.
Not all articles were cloned from Wikipedia. The article on the Polish National Catholic Church has no disclaimer. Wikipedia has an article, but it’s shorter and less detailed than Grokipedia’s. What Grokipedia lacks are photos. This was a pattern I saw looking things up on Grokipedia: There are no photos, even on articles cloned from Wikipedia that do have photos. (See both sites’ articles on the Russian dish ‘pelmeni.’ Several photos on Wiki; none on Groki.)
My guess is that this is a V0.1 problem and they’re still working on machinery for grabbing photos from Wikipedia or other sources. The Grokipedia articles are very plain, and don’t have a summary box on the right.
It’s unclear who actually writes the articles that are not from Wikipedia. Supposedly Grok does, but I have to wonder if there are editors in the loop. It’s possible to report errors in articles, but ordinary people can’t edit existing articles nor write new ones. I created an account there but it’s unclear what that account allows me to do.
Grokipedia is just getting started, so it’s missing some middling items. For example, there is no article on author Sarah A. Hoyt. During the search for her, Grokipedia brought up several hundred other people named Sarah, but their last names are in random order, making the list useless. Glenn Reynolds is missing, as are Jon Gabriel, Stephen Kruiser, Charlie Martin and others from that general group of authors. Charles Petzold’s Wikipedia bio has been slurped up by Grokipedia, as has that of Nancy Kress, but no other SFF authors of my acquaintance are there, even ones who have been reasonably successful, like Brad Torgerson. Weirdly, Groki has the Wiki article on the Bolo Universe, but none on Keith Laumer, who created it. (Nor on Retief, either.)
Golf clap. Good start, but there’s a LOT of work to be done still. I’ll be checking in on Grokipedia from time to time, and if something interesting turns up I’ll report it here.
