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Scalzi Reviews Grokipedia↗
30 Oct
whatever.scalzi.com
...by reading his own biography. Not surprisingly, it gets a lot of things wrong even when the correct information is available, and it puts a lot of emphasis on the decade-old Sad Puppies kerfuffle because apparently right-wingers are still obsessed with it or something. Some choice excerpts:
> fundamentally LLMs aren’t built for accuracy, they’re built for statistical probability, and these really are two separate things. > Having used Wikipedia for a while now, I feel reasonably sure that its biases are not “liberal,” they’re “pedantic,” > Which is to say, if you have to choose a “pedia” to trust, you might choose the one assembled by a bunch of pedantic nerds saying “well, ACTUALLY” to each other until the heat death of the universe, over the one assembled by an LLM controlled by a, insecure Nazi salute-throwing billionaire who sprints to reprogram that LLM every time it shares a fact that makes that billionaire angry or sad, or doesn’t fit into his Playskool Machiavellian ambitions and plans. In this particular case, a thousand pedantic nerds is much better than a single rich one.
> fundamentally LLMs aren’t built for accuracy, they’re built for statistical probability, and these really are two separate things. > Having used Wikipedia for a while now, I feel reasonably sure that its biases are not “liberal,” they’re “pedantic,” > Which is to say, if you have to choose a “pedia” to trust, you might choose the one assembled by a bunch of pedantic nerds saying “well, ACTUALLY” to each other until the heat death of the universe, over the one assembled by an LLM controlled by a, insecure Nazi salute-throwing billionaire who sprints to reprogram that LLM every time it shares a fact that makes that billionaire angry or sad, or doesn’t fit into his Playskool Machiavellian ambitions and plans. In this particular case, a thousand pedantic nerds is much better than a single rich one.