Britannica Didn’t Just Survive. It’s an A.I. Company Now. | Hacker News Reader

Britannica Didn’t Just Survive. It’s an A.I. Company Now.

nytimes.com

50 pointsthm43 comments

I love Wikipedia but I’ve been more and more annoyed at it lately: more spam, more thinly veiled advertising, more political slant. And as always articles turn into a long list of facts and lack a coherent story and writing style.

Going back to EB has been very refreshing: high quality, concise, thought out articles. You can actually read them in one shot and it’s enjoyable.

Of course EB has its problems and I’m afraid that it’s in that spot where it’s still reaping the benefits of a hundred years of serious investment and prestige but is quickly declining in coverage of more recent changes.

Once in a long while I encounter a Wikipedia article that's been edited to promote something (or whitewash somebody), and then I go and root out the edits. It's not an overwhelming problem. I'll agree about writing style, though. It's like one of those collaborative artworks, people adding small pieces everywhere, no composition. Overhauling an article so it reads well is an onerous task.

This is the way. Thank you.

I mean, audience of this site should be better-then-average fit for message of:

- Found a problem with crowd-sourced/open-source piece? Don't complain. Make a quality contribution where you can. Otherwise - see if there is a bug report already, maybe submit one if there is none. On wikipedia, that's via "Talk" section.

I have tried doing this as well, but usually the edits get reversed within 48 hours by a power user of Wikipedia. I have given up. You have never encountered this or are you a power user yourself?

There has never been a time when people didn't have a political, religious or ideological slant. French historians write different articles about the invasion of 1672 than their Dutch colleagues.

or the Latin history of tribes in the far north

There's never been a time when people didn't ____ (fight wars / die of disease / die of starvation / etc / etc). We know that very well, and that's why we work hard to improve our world.

Compare the world you were born into with those from history, and you'll see we can accomplish incredible things.

my issue with wikipedia is that its only a reflection of controlled mainstream information, and notably corporate news like CNN. every corporate news outlet like CNN has incredible bias to the point of blatant dishonesty, but because of how wikipedia works, sites like CNN are the word of god and everything they write is treated like fact. therefore wikipedia is effectively an extension of the propaganda getting pushed out by the billionaire owners of news companies.

disclaimer: its not just CNN, I'm not right-wing, yes also right wing sites are bias and dishonest, maybe even more so

I don't actually read CNN, but having a look at the Wikipedia for "Islamic terrorism" which I guess is the kind of stuff CNN avoids, there's quite a lot of coverage from non corporate sources, the first three references being The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought and And God Knows the Martyrs: Martyrdom and Violence in Jihadi-Salafism from Oxford University Press.

Just saying that saying it's all CNN like stuff may be a bit unfair to Wikipedia.

Go look at it for Hillary Clinton, and specifically the sources for anything from the past 15 years of her life. It's 80-90% corporate news sources owned or controlled by billionaires.

Britannica has a uniquely high-quality collection of general knowledge. Many of their current articles are written by domain experts, sometimes leading experts. (In the past, people like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud wrote articles for Britannica.) They also own Merriam-Webster, a highly-respected dictionary.

I wonder if that content trains their AI and how much difference it makes.

Also, is there value in training an AI on a dictionary? It would lead to poor writing style.

Every model is trained in Wiktionary, a larger and higher quality dictionary. Every model is trained on Wikipedia, a larger and higher quality encyclopedia.

"Train an AI" is a bit of a red flag, fyi, as a phrase. What is an "AI"? Do you mean "large language model"? Something else?

> Wiktionary, a larger and higher quality dictionary

> Wikipedia, a larger and higher quality encyclopedia.

What is the basis for those claims?

In my experience with them, both have clearly less accuracy than Merriam-Webster and Britannica, respectively. But that's only anecodotal.

Do you have an anecdote? I'm sure you're right and there are Britannica articles that are more accurate than their Wiki counterparts, but it'd be interesting to see an example.

It would be an interesting use of AI tools to try to flag differences between the two as a means of identifying gaps in coverage or factual mistakes (in either one).

And I specifically mean flag. As in, for human review. The last thing Wikipedia needs is spam AI edit submissions (it's probably already happening).

I don't see the value:

If you mean the anecdote is evidence, it's much too small a sample to be representative of anything.

If you don't believe any Britannica article is more accurate than a Wikipedia counterpart, you have other issues. :)

This is a large subject of course but the consensus I have always seen is that wikipedia is better because it has more eyes on each subject that can find errors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

>Opinions on accuracy were almost equal between the two encyclopedias (6 favoring Britannica, 7 favoring Wikipedia, 5 stating they were equal), and eleven of the eighteen (61%) found Wikipedia somewhat or substantially more complete, compared to seven of the eighteen (39%) for Britannica.

> the consensus I have always seen is that wikipedia is better because it has more eyes on each subject that can find errors.

More eyes can help, but aren't necessary, they are not sufficient, and they have a downside or two

* In the post-truth age of automated mass disinformation, majorities can be completely wrong (probably they could do that previously, also). Imagine trying to write about climate change or vaccines or trans health for certain populations; the many eyes often bully and abuse people into silence.

* The nuance of an expert is often lost in editing by a mass of non-experts, who don't understand it enough to know what they are missing or to state it in other ways and contexts.

* Look at sports: The masses sometimes strongly disagree with decisions and actions that are (nearly) provably correct. The coach, the expert, knows better.

On the upside, Wikipedia has much greater breadth, but personally, I never know what I can trust.

Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AErrors_in_the_Ency...

This is a great approach if an encyclopedia represents a very large proof about the world, but is that what it is?

https://archive.ph/6RNrP

That person didn't die. They are a zombie now.

All we want to do is eat your brains

We're not unreasonable; I mean, no one's gonna eat your eyes

Re: Your Brains

A printed version of the English Wikipedia, in the style of Britannica would occupy over 3,500 volumes. I think survival in this case is more like clinging on.

A while ago I purchased a full set of the Harvard Classics, first edition. I had a blast going through them. Part of me wishes they'd release an updated Encyclopaedia, and I could certainly afford it now compared to when I was a young college grad. But part of me also knows they'd probably just gather dust, to remain ignored even by my children. The paper quality on the later editions were never particularly good, and they never felt quite nice to leaf through.

Where did you find them? I may it may not be working on an ML-powered syntopicon, would love to get a copy of the books in irl paper.

Oh great, yet another company that spits out text and crosses its fingers that it's either correct, subtly enough incorrect that the user won't notice, or that the user doesn't even care because they'll copy/paste the output without reading it.

We used to have a set. Sadly I think it got damaged in a flood. Tragic really, some good stuff in there, and an important part of history.

I guess maybe I'll leave a copy of Wikipedia lying around somewhere at some point so somebody can stumble upon it and be amused.

Not tragic enough to visit local Goodwill to pick up replacement, right? :) Lets face it, young people wont be reading paper encyclopedias ever again.

Wow, not sure why the nasty tone. I'd love a replacement.

We're all AI companies now!

The one thing that struck me about this article is that there's not even a hint that all companies are now AI companies. Reading this article made it clear that Britannica isn't doing anything different from any other publishing company or any other company for that matter, so it's just a matter of yelling AI over and over again to get attention, and it works.

>Britannica Didn’t Just Survive. It’s an A.I. Company Now.

I wouldn't call that surviving. It's like someone reanimating your corpse and pretending it's still you.

Fortunately, the headline is easy to fix:

> Britannica Didn’t Survive. It’s an A.I. Company Now.

lol, yeah. 4 years ago it would have been "It's a Block Chain Company Now".

Between britannica.com and Merriam-Webster, their sites get 120 million visits per month, per SimilarWeb. That's not ChatGPT level popularity, but it's way better than mere survival. It might even be more "visits" than their hardcopy books got back in the day. (At least in the case of Britannica, it surely is -- EB only ever sold 7 million copies in its history. [1]).

The idea that they're turning into an "AI Company" is just the headline writer's spin on things; I don't think that's how they see themselves at all.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/03/encyclopaedi...

If 1 million of those copies went to public or school libraries, it's not impossible to imagine that they were referenced 5 times a day each on average—before the internet became mainstream. That makes 150 million "visits" a month.

That doesn't make any extra money, internet visits are more valuable.

Do you have any idea what the price of that thing was, back in the days?!

There's an order of magnitude fewer libraries than that, but I get your point, and you may be right. It's an interesting "Fermi problem".

I wonder how these numbers compare to the dictionary, which is much cheaper but was also much more widely sold.

BTW Microsoft Encarta clobbered the print EB a few years before the Web finished the job. EB sales fell by 50% within three years of its release! See "The Reference Wars" for a closer look at this: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%2520Files/Reference%2520...

R.I.P. Retired In Place

The Deep Space 9 episode with Iggy Pop was on TV yesterday.

When the Ferengi accidentally shot the prisoner they were going to exchange with Iggy, they used a set of ‘neural stimulators’ to move their muscles and make them walk zombie-esque to the exchange.

This statement makes me think of that.

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