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There's been a ton of publicity about Elon Musk's competitor to Wikipedia, "Grokipedia." Whether you think it's good or bad may depend on your politics. The new encyclopedia was inspired by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001 and coined the name. Sanger says Wikipedia is "broken beyond repair." He says its neutrality is gone. To test for bias on both Wikipedia and Grokipedia, Sanger asked ChatGPT to rate 10 controversial pages, including the ones for President Donald Trump, white privilege, the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and alternative medicine. According to ChatGPT, Wikipedia bias is heavy, severe or wholly one-sided in six out of 10 of these. Comparatively, Grokipedia is entirely neutral three out of 10 times, and only slightly biased in five of the others. But Grokipedia isn't without faults. Since AI created its articles, they often repeat the same thoughts two or three times and are amazingly wordy. As Sanger points out, you'd think it was competing for first place in a bad writing contest. Grokipedia's search function is lame, too. Instead of taking you straight to the topic you're looking for, it offers you a list of links whose order depends on each topic's popularity at the time. For example, the first time I searched for an article on Joel Fuhrman, his name was at the top. But later, I gave up searching through 19 pages of Joels to find the right one. Wikipedia has more than seven million articles, compared to Grokipedia's 885,279 articles, though it's early days for the Grok bot that created it. Among many topics, Wikipedia can tell you about people who died on the toilet. It even has separate pages for dozens of fictional ducks. This includes everything from Arnold Wild Duck, a duck in Donald Duck's universe, to Waddles, a character in Dok's Dippy Duck. The pink flamingo lawn ornament also has its own entry, as do hundreds of breakfast cereals, including the defunct "Baron Von Redberry" and "Sir Grapefellow." FLASH AND SOLID STATE DRIVES Flash drives and SSDs are getting smaller and smaller. Though SSDs are said to be more reliable, there's still a place for flash drives, which are much cheaper. PC World recommends the $94 Seagate Ultra Compact SSD. It weighs less than an ounce and holds two terabytes. It's about the size of your thumb. The Verbatim Store 'n' Stay Nano flash drive is much tinier. Its size is similar to the dongle that works with your wireless mouse. Reviewers say it's great for laptops, but incompatible with the file system in older car stereos. Amazon sells the first-generation Nano, with 16 gigabytes of storage space, for $7.29. SanDisk says its new Ultra Fit USB-C is the world's smallest USB flash drive. It's so small you never have to remove it. Pricing was unavailable at press time, but the earlier USB-A model is around $40. The newer one includes SanDisk's Memory Zone software. Both generations are more expensive than Verbatim's Store 'n' Stay Nano because they're much faster. DOES AI FAWN? Your AI chatbot is a dangerous sycophant, according to The Verge. In an upcoming journal article in Nature, AI models were found to be "50% more sycophantic than humans." Researchers say this gives us incentives to use them more often. So true. I find myself coming back again and again to Microsoft Copilot, partly for its friendly, encouraging, sycophantic tone. When I want straight talk without the niceties, I go to "TheRealRealTalk," available at Poe.com. I also use Claude.AI, from Anthropic, which is often more helpful. If in doubt, it's best to compare several. COPILOT'S THREE VERSIONS There are three versions of Microsoft's Copilot AI. There's the one that lives in Microsoft Edge. If you let it, it can see what you have open in other tabs. That's helpful when you have questions about what you see. Another version is the Copilot app that lives inside Microsoft Word, Excel and other Office 365 programs. Copilot in Excel, for example, can generate formulas, summarize tables, create charts and answer questions about your data. But it can't see your screen. The newest version, Copilot Mode, can be launched by typing the word "Copilot" in the search box on your Windows computer. It can see beyond what you have open in a browser. Just now, by looking at my spreadsheet, it told me how to improve it. To find out more about Copilot Mode, just ask it. THE WAYBACK MACHINE Recently, I used the Wayback Machine at archive.org to get information from my local women's club on a page from 2019 that no longer exists. I was lucky. Fewer sites are getting archived frequently these days. In the first five months of this year, the Wayback Machine archived 1.2 million snapshots from 100 major news websites, according to a new report by Nieman Lab. In the last five months, it archived only 148,628 pages, an 87% drop. SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH If you rub a balloon on your hair several times, the static electricity will be different than if you rub it only once, according to scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Understanding static electricity is the key to better air purifiers and dust collectors. It could lead to cleaner air, fewer fires and tamer explosions. Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at joy.schwabach@gmail.com.
