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.

On Bray ·
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.

Speaking as a leading but highly biased expert on the subject of T. Bray, here are the key take-aways:

(Overly) complete ·
It covers all the territory; there is no phase of my life’s activity that could possibly be encountered in combing the Web
that is not exhaustively covered. In theory this should be good but in fact, who cares about the details of what I worked on
at Sun Microsystems between 2004 and 2010? I suppose I should but, like I said, I couldn’t force myself to plod all the way
through it.

Wrong ·
Every paragraph contains significant errors. Sometimes the text is explicitly self-contradictory on the face of it,
sometimes the mistakes are subtle enough that only I would spot them.

Style ·
The writing has that LLM view-from-nowhere flat-affect semi-academic flavor. I don’t like it but the evidence suggests that
some people do?

References ·
All the references are just URLs and at least some of them entirely fail to support the text. Here’s an example. In
discussion of my expert-witness work for the FTC in their litigation against Meta concerning its acquisitions of Instagram and
WhatsApp, Grokipedia says:

[Bray] opined that users’ perceptions of response times in online services critically influence market
dynamics.

It cites
Federal
Trade Commission’s Reply to Meta Platforms, Inc.’s Response to Federal Trade Commission’s Counterstatement of Material
Facts (warning: 2,857-page PDF). Okay, that was one of the things I argued, but the 425 pages of court documents that I
filed, and the references to my reporting in the monster document, make it clear that it was one tiny subset of the main
argument.

Anyhow, I (so that you won’t have to) spent a solid fifteen minutes spelunking back and forth through that FTC doc, looking
for strings like “response time” and “latency” and so on. Maybe somewhere in those pages there’s support for the claim quoted
above, but I couldn’t find it.

Useful? ·
Wikipedia, in my mind, has two main purposes: A quick visit to find out the basics about some city or person or plant or
whatever, or a deep-dive to find out what we really know about genetic linkages to autism or Bach’s relationship with
Frederick the Great or whatever.

At the moment, Grokipedia doesn’t really serve either purpose very well. But, after all, this is release 0.1, maybe we
should give it a chance.

Or, maybe not.

Woke/Anti-Woke ·
The whole point, one gathers, is to provide an antidote to Wikipedia’s alleged woke bias. So I dug into that. Let’s consider
three examples of what I found. First, from that same paragraph about the FTC opinion quoted above:

While Bray and aligned progressives contend that such dominance stifles innovation by enabling predatory acquisitions and
reduced rivalry—evidenced by fewer startup exits in concentrated sectors—counterarguments highlight that Big Tech’s scale has
fueled empirical gains, with these firms investing over $240 billion in U.S. R&D in 2024 (more than a quarter of national
totals) and driving AI, cloud, and patent surges.[128]
[131] Six tech industries alone accounted for
over one-third of
U.S. GDP growth from 2012–2021, comprising about 9% of the
economy and sustaining 9.3 million jobs amid falling consumer prices and rapid technological diffusion.
[132]
[133]
Right-leaning economists often defend consumer welfare metrics and market self-correction, warning that forced divestitures
risk eroding the efficiencies and investment incentives that have propelled sector productivity above 6% annual growth in key
areas like durable manufacturing tech.
[134]
[135]

I’ve linked the numbered citations to the indicated URLs. Maybe visit one or two of them and see what you think? Four are
to articles arguing, basically, that monopolies must be OK because the companies accused of it are growing really fast and
driving the economy. They seem mostly to be from right-wing think-tanks but I guess that’s what those think-tanks are for. One
of them, #131, Big Tech and the US Digital-Military-Industrial Complex, I think isn’t helpful to the argument at
all. But still, it’s broadly doing what they advertise: Pushing back against “woke” positions, in this case the position that
monopolization is bad.

I looked at a couple of other examples. For example, this is from the header of the Greta Thunberg article:

While credited with elevating youth engagement on environmental issues, Thunberg’s promotion of urgent, existential climate
threats has drawn scrutiny for diverging from nuanced empirical assessments of climate risks and adaptation capacities, as
well as for extending her activism into broader political arenas such as anti-capitalist and geopolitical protests.[5][6]

Somehow I feel no urge to click on those citation links.

If Ms Thunberg is out there on the “woke” end of the spectrum, let’s flit over to the other end, namely the entry for
J.D. Vance, on the subject of his book Hillbilly Elegy.

Critics from progressive outlets, including Sarah Smarsh in her 2018 book Heartland, faulted the memoir for
overemphasizing personal and cultural failings at the expense of structural economic policies, arguing it perpetuated
stereotypes of rural whites as self-sabotaging.[71] These objections, often rooted in institutional analyses from academia and
media, overlooked data on behavioral patterns like opioid dependency rates—peaking at 21.5 deaths per 100,000 in Appalachia
around 2016—that aligned with Vance’s observations of “deaths of despair” precursors.[72]

I read and enjoyed Heartland but the citation is to a New Yorker article that doesn’t mention
Smarsh. As for the second sentence… my first reaction as I trudged through its many clauses, was “life’s too short”.
But seriously, opioid-death statistics weaken the hypothesis about structural economic issues? Don’t get it.

Take-away ·
Wikipedia is,
to quote myself, the encyclopedia that “anyone who’s willing to
provide citations can edit”.
Grokipedia is “the encyclopedia that Elon Musk’s LLM can edit, with sketchy citations and no progressive argument left
un-attacked.”

So I guess it’s Working As Intended?