Hacker News Reader

Comment by MountDoom | Hacker News Reader

Pages about companies and contemporary politics make up a relatively small percentage of Wikipedia. And what's the realistic alternative? These pages are always going to represent opinions. Traditional encyclopedias usually represent views closer to the establishment mainstream, but that's just a function of who gets a job at Britannica versus who has the time to edit Wikipedia all day.

Will Elonpedia be better in that respect? Its owner is not exactly known from having a healthy distance to internet culture wars.

More importantly, even if all these pages disappear overnight, Wikipedia is still extremely valuable and beneficial.

View on HN

Yes but with AI, in principle, there is more wriggle room to present a spectrum of opinions on a single topic. It is all about what is baked into the models. Like can it discuss x topic from multiple competing angles and capture the complexity. That is important for history, politics, medicine, science and so on. This does not currently happen on many wikipedia pages in these domains imo.

Narrative engineering with AI is a pretty scary prospect so I can see how the wikipedia model with genuinely random human editors might have a major advantage there. If it is simply a vanity project, and not an uncensored Grok model, then obviously it would be garbage and hilariously biased.

> Yes but with AI, in principle, there is more wriggle room to present a spectrum of opinions on a single topic.

I mean, this sounds impartial but isn't. If you have an article on the planet Earth and present a spectrum of opinions on whether it's round or flat, you're not being balanced; you're implicitly supporting flat-Earthers and their trollish beliefs by taking them seriously.

This has countless parallels in political discourse. Trade flat-Earthers for (actual) neo-Nazis; it's probably not a "spectrum of opinions" you want to broadcast without passing any judgment. It's not the role of an encyclopedia to be a free speech platform.

I'm not really saying this to defend political articles on Wikipedia. It's just that I don't think you fix it by taking an LLM trained on Wikipedia, and telling it to regenerate the articles "without bias".

Wikipedia actually has multiple articles on flat Earth beliefs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth Presenting a spectrum of opinions doesn't mean you have to avoid giving the impression of passing judgment. If an opinion conflicts with available evidence, you can just acknowledge that the opinion exists and give the evidence against it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com