{"id":5505,"date":"2025-11-02T14:57:52","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T21:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5505"},"modified":"2025-11-02T15:01:58","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T22:01:58","slug":"grokipedia-v0-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5505","title":{"rendered":"Grokipedia V0.1"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2026Grokipedia<\/a>. I didn\u2019t list X because he didn\u2019t create it; he just wrote checks.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWho is —-?\u201d 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<\/a>. That exercise made me glad my last name isn\u2019t Smith. Then I asked about\u2026me. Who is Jeff Duntemann? You can read its reply here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for all of us, I\u2019m not dead. I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

And now\u2014ta daaa!\u2014<\/em>we have Grokipedia. It\u2019s only a few days old and still at V0.1, so I won\u2019t be too hard on it. As best I can tell, it\u2019s a Grok-ish AI front end for a Wikipedia-ish encyclopedia. Musk claims he\u2019s trying to remove political bias from Wikipedia\u2019s articles that touch on politics. (Good luck with that<\/em>, pilgrim.) On the other hand, he generally gets what he asks for and pays for.<\/p>\n

Grokipedia\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be watching the Grok article counter going forward. I can almost hear some major crunching in the background.<\/p>\n

Not all articles were cloned from Wikipedia. The article on the Polish National Catholic Church has no disclaimer. Wikipedia has an article, but it\u2019s shorter and less detailed than Grokipedia\u2019s. 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\u2019 articles on the Russian dish \u2018pelmeni.\u2019 Several photos on Wiki; none on Groki.)<\/p>\n

My guess is that this is a V0.1 problem and they\u2019re still working on machinery for grabbing photos from Wikipedia or other sources. The Grokipedia articles are very plain, and don\u2019t have a summary box on the right.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s possible to report errors in articles, but ordinary people can\u2019t edit existing articles nor write new ones. I created an account there but it\u2019s unclear what that account allows me to do.<\/p>\n

Grokipedia is just getting started, so it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

Golf clap. Good start, but there\u2019s a LOT of work to be done still. I\u2019ll be checking in on Grokipedia from time to time, and if something interesting turns up I\u2019ll report it here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2026Grokipedia. I didn\u2019t list X because he didn\u2019t create it; he just wrote checks. If you recall, I started playing around with Grok earlier this year. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5505"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5507,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5505\/revisions\/5507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}