Tim Bray on Grokipedia

Tim Bray:

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.

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.

Putting aside the political slant of Grokipedia, a 1,300-word article being better than a 7,000-word one exemplifies the current shortcomings of LLMs as creative engines (as opposed to serving as mere tools in the arsenal of human creators).

The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously quipped: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” No encyclopedia in history has been written with less time or effort than Musk’s LLM-generated vanity project. Verbosity is not the worst of Grokipedia’s deficiencies, but it’s one of them. The more its entries stray from simply regurgitating the equivalent entry in Wikipedia, the more they suffer from verbal diarrhea.

(My own Grokipedia entry is just a clone of my Wikipedia entry, with a few mistakes added, including one in the first sentence regarding the creation of Markdown.)

★ Friday, 31 October 2025