Did Wikipedia just get dethroned?
Maybe, Grokipedia has just launched as a direct competitor to the original online, open source encyclopedia, but only time will tell if it kicks Wikipedia off its pedestal.
Elon Musk has touted Grokipedia for seeking “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.
To accomplish this, Grokipedia will purportedly use its AI namesake to act as a gatekeeper and will tell you if it will allow you to publish an entry.
For those that don’t know, Wikipedia operates by allowing virtually anyone to make an entry. The idea behind so-called “open source” encyclopedias is that if everyone contributes, even though there may be outliers, eventually the correct answer will ‘bubble to the surface’.
In theory, the plan was sound but in practice it has devolved with critics complaining of ideological and political bias tainting the entries.
Grokipedia seeks to do away with this kind of editorial gamesmanship by using the power of its neural net to “seek maximum truth”.
Once again, the theory seems sound - what better way to use AI than to scan the interwebs to instantly verify whether someone is trolling or not?
Of course, who controls the AI is always a question as nothing is perfect. Still the public does tend to benefit from competition in the market and, when used properly, there doesn’t seem to be a downside here.
Deep Dive-
All three of the readers will no doubt instantly shout, “if the product is free then you’re the product!” — a warning that ‘free’ services derive a less visible benefit of some kind or else, how could there be any incentive to offer it?
This seems like a fair point — virtually every ‘free’ service, be it smartphone app, social media platform, search engine, email service etc… gets compensated through data — your data. And so, it is fair to ask Grokipedia, ‘what’s in it for you?’
It’s also fair to drill deeper on the ‘gatekeeper’ question — sure, if done correctly, it could be a wonderful thing. Functionally it would be no different than what some learned academics of ‘analog age’ did in curating the encyclopedia’s printed on physical mediums - they picked what they thought best based upon their education and critical thinking skills. Perhaps it’s the comparative ease with which an algorithm may be ‘tweaked’ — thereby changing the ‘personality’ of the AI — that has some uneasy.
Then again, how much worse could it be? After all, using the Wikipedia model, anyone with anyone with any agenda can make edits as they see fit —it has been documented that even the CIA and FBI have made entries (or at least people using CIA & FBI computers did).
So if that’s not it, why would anyone oppose such a thing as this? Pushing past the standard ideological ‘static’, perhaps the real reason Grokipedia has, (human), skeptics is that its constitutes one of the first times that the AI is the decider. I.e. unlike most human-AI interactions thus far, where the AI is friendly, accommodating and nearly always at our ‘beck and call’ — this time, the AI will be ‘judging’ us — making us prove to it that our submission is worthy. With the rapidity with which AI has taken over our lives (remember in 2020 when AI was just for nerds and sci fi movies?), perhaps there is a part of our brains that is saying “this is what your next traffic ticket hearing will feel like” or “ this is what your next job interview is going to involve”.
One thing remains clear, humans must continue to think critically and never give in to the temptation to ‘outsource common sense’.
Will you be using Grokipedia? If so for what primarily?
