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- [00:00]
Matt
There are a few things I want to talk about today. I want to revisit some old friends. I want to talk about robots. I also want to talk about Grokipedia, the Awesome, the first right wing wiki website ever that's ever been made. No one's ever done one before. So Josh, do you feel kind of like an idiot now that the main authoritative, democratically derived source of truth that we can all sort of share is probably one of the greatest achievements of, of the 21st century has basically just become Tucker Carlson?
- [00:35]
Josh
Yeah, no, I feel really stupid that, you know, I, for a very long time was like, oh, consensus reality and agreeing on things based on research and citations and things like that. That's good and that's how the world should exist. But the reality is, yeah, we've moved past the need for that and it should all be automated by a large language model that is sort of prompted by the world's stupidest man. I think that's really good.
- [01:04]
Matt
Yeah, I think also it's great that it's like. And if you look up like, hey, what happened with George Floyd? It'll be like he was a drug addict, he deserved to die. And then they're like, finally someone's telling the whole truth, which to them is like basically justifying whatever, anything. It's like, look the way, the best way to think about conservative thought, right, if it can be called such a thing, is that it is supposed to be a soft play area for any prejudice that you might have. Which means that if you're looking up George Floyd, the Grokipedia knows that why you're doing it is because you're. I don't know, the reason I, I've seen some screenshots of it, this is one of the ones I saw. But the reason you're doing that is because your, you know, shit ass nephew has just like, you know, brought up like hey, maybe the police shouldn't have killed that guy five years ago and you need to go and have yourself reassured I that no, it was right that they did it cuz he was dangerous.
- [01:54]
Josh
I mean to sort of drop the jokey haha fun tone. I am looking at the Grokopedia article about George Floyd, which I had not done up until just now. This is fucking revolting. This is absolutely disgusting. This is one of the worst things I've seen in a bit like it kicks off by saying George Perry Floyd Jr. Was an American man with a lengthy criminal record including convictions for armed robbery, drug possession and theft in Texas from 1997 to 2007, that is the leading state sentence.
- [02:23]
Matt
It's like, hey, this guy died, but it was fine.
- [02:26]
Josh
It doesn't even include the fact that he died in the first sentence. That's the most. Unfortunately, the most notable thing about him in terms of his impact on the world is the way in which he was fucking murdered.
- [02:40]
Matt
And then right when they say, oh, he died. But also contributory factors included severe hypertensive anthrosclerotic cardiovascular disease, fentanyl intoxication and a recent methamphetamine use, and so on and so on and so on.
- [02:52]
Josh
Yeah, man. What if his neck just did that?
- [02:54]
Sarah
That.
- [02:54]
Josh
Shut the fuck up.
- [02:55]
Matt
Yeah. Basically it's like I say, it's a soft play area for justifications of the less humanity of other people. Right? It's a soft play area where every time you like jump on the trampoline, it directly hits someone who is strapped underneath the trampoline. Basically the same thing if you look at the January 6th riots. The same thing if you look at like the immigration emergency in the uk, which we'll get to in a second. And you know, now that exists. And so it's the continued bifurcation of reality between, you know, know, basically fascists and everyone else. And there it is, it's. That's an Elon's built his big like methane fueled large language model, you know, Wikipedia copy paste that just like inserts whatever, you know, like, whatever, like Facebook opinion into Wikipedia articles that it can find.
- [03:45]
Josh
Well, and the utility of something like this is that, yes, it's, it's to provide a counterpoint to Wikipedia and it's something that appears to be a more authoritative source. But the thing that's also remarkable about it, of course, is that compared to the output of a typical large language model where you never know what you're going to get, this is setting specific prompts in stone so that it is in fact consistent when you access across multiple different things at multiple different times. And that makes it a more durable way to reshape language and reshape reality. Because obviously the way that more and more and more of the Internet works is that because it is increasingly powered by large language models, those sources are going to be scraping other sources and it's going to make it more probabilistically likely that when you search for, for instance, the January 6th United States Capitol attack, it will say that, you know, I'm just like looking here at what it says. After unauthorized occupation of areas including the Senate chamber, most carried no firearms and the incursion was cleared within hours, allowing certification to resume that evening.
- [04:47]
Matt
So it basically was like a. Not a big deal.
- [04:49]
Josh
It was pretty chill.
- [04:49]
Sarah
Yeah.
- [04:50]
Matt
Why. Why even worry about America's beer hall? Put. And so then when I think about this in context, of course, I also think about, like, what is Elon politically doing right now? Elon has resumed his. Again, he talks about predicting a civil war in the uk, but anytime an American commentator looks at the UK and quote, unquote, predicts a civil war, what they're actually doing is they're saying, ooh, I hope there's a civil war in the UK Because I'm imagining a kind of, you know, version of the Crusades, basically, but that they don't have to, like, leave their town.
- [05:21]
Josh
Right? Yeah. There is something nice about a war for civilization, quote unquote, where its impacts will not potentially reach you directly. And he's really, really been talking a lot about Tommy Robinson lately.
- [05:36]
Matt
Oh, yeah. He says when Tolkien wrote about the Hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of English shires who don't realize the horrors that take place far away. They want to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor. With what happened to that nice man who was murdered while walking his dog will happen to all of England. If the tide of illegal immigration is not turned, it is time for the English to ally with the hard men like Tommy Robinson and fight for their survival or they shall surely all die. So, yeah, again, it's like, hey, if you ask most people, right, Like, I'll give an example, right? A woman called into Julia Hartley Brewer's show being like, I personally know four people in London who've been murdered. And it's like, 70 people were murdered in London last year.
- [06:16]
Sarah
70 people.
- [06:17]
Josh
And. And I saw the baby and it looked at me.
- [06:19]
Sarah
Yeah.
- [06:20]
Matt
And the baby looked at me. And also, the baby was an illegal immigrant and the baby murdered me, right? I was murdered by. I was murdered by an illegal baby. And now I've called Julia Harley Brewer, and I'm sort of complaining about it on talk tv. And. But really, if you get down to the bottom of it, I think Sarah Pochin, the Reform or Pusheen or whatever, the Reform mp, who's recently again been in the news for being like, hey, my main problem is that TV adverts are full of black and Asian people. And that's. And because it's like, the demographics of advertising are super important. You know, we need to see British ads for British people. I want the John Lewis ad to feature all white people sitting around at Christmas and they call it Christmas and they say, merry Christmas. Because these are ultimately, like we always say. These are people who are getting mad at stuff on their screens. Most of these people don't know any immigrants. Most of these people don't live in fucking London. Most of these people are. It's nothing. And yet they're all just talking to one another. And Elon Musk is looking at them, talking to each other. And soon they're going to be able to go to Grokopedia and. And they're going to be able to ground all these crazy beliefs. Not in the kind of, I don't know, swirling morass of just like, posts that a reference post where they saw someone else posting or like radio call in show drama. But this is like, I think a foundational text of. Or it could be a foundational text of a sort of different version of consensus reality that doesn't rely on posts and articles and news stories and stuff that they can then look at where it's like, oh, yeah, well, crime by race in the United Kingdom is super important. The grooming gang's inquiry is super important. The police, of course, weren't involved at all. It was all like, scary immigrants, you know. And so I. I see these things like. Like, I see so many things as fundamentally related. I see these things as fundamentally related. Complaining about advertisements calling into Julia Hartley Brewer saying, you've been murdered. The Grokipedia article that says that reminds you of all the drugs that George Floyd was on when he was murdered by the police, you know, and it is quite alarming, I suppose it is also funny, of course, that Elon Musk is saying that the hard man, Tommy Robinson, who's a very small fake hooligan. The person who is. You need to turn to.
- [08:22]
Sarah
Yeah, I look, I looked up the Grokipedia. The Grokipedia, fuck it all.
- [08:26]
Matt
I looked up the Grokipedia. It said, I made a very nice ballroom Tommy Robinson.
- [08:31]
Sarah
The opening paragraph, I think, is, like, very interesting in terms of, like, what it tells us about what this thing is. So it says that Stephen Yaxley Lennon, better known in the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, is a British activist and citizen journalist, primarily recognized for founding the English Defence League and advocating against Islamist extremism and organized child sexual exploitation networks in the United Kingdom.
- [08:50]
Matt
Oh, that's what he.
- [08:50]
Josh
That's what he's known. Riley.
- [08:52]
Matt
Oh, crazy.
- [08:53]
Sarah
I would maybe do the other thing, but, like, also the other thing is that this page is massive, like, compared to, like, other. Really. Okay, because I sort of assume that, like, the special interest stuff for, like, X users, for example.
- [09:04]
Josh
No, no, no. All of them are way too long. And that's because the way these are spat out largely by large language models, they are always way too long. Everything they put out is way too long.
- [09:17]
Sarah
Yeah, because. Because it also just like. I think. I think the point about just, like, kind of letting the LLM kind of run wild, but it's like sort of putting enough guardrails in there to be able to sort of, like, craft a narrative, like, and also, like, you know, bearing in mind, like, the things that people read, like, it's very, you know, the idea that, like, you know, people will sort of, kind of only read the first few paragraphs. The first few paragraphs have then become very, very important. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like whether this is, like, influential or beats Wikipedia or not is, like, sort of a secondary question to the fact that, like, what this really operates as is, like, a system that, like, organizes various disparate conspiracy, like, conspiracy theories into something of seemingly on the superficially coherent.