Halupedia: the Wikipedia where everything is an AI hallucination

Somewhere in the growing landfill of AI-generated internet content sits Halupedia, an infinite encyclopedia where every historical event, citation, and scholarly institution is hallucinated into existence the moment you click it.

Usually, AI hallucinations occur while prompting and end in frustration, especially when it gives flat-out disinformation or garbles another language mid-answer.

For some, though, these hallucinations are fun to nerd out to, and thankfully, they’ve been cataloged in something similar to Wikipedia form, which is called (ready for it?), Halupedia.

The description runs as follows:

An infinite, hallucinated encyclopedia. Every link leads to an entry that does not exist yet – until you click it, at which point an LLM pretends it has always existed and writes it for you, in the deadpan register of a 19th-century scholarly press.

So, that’s two unique selling points. Desirably embellished as you go, and antiquated slop. Let’s do it.

The nerdiest of nerds will appreciate one of the articles trending on Halupedia about the so-called Great Pigeon Census of 1887, which “meticulously counted every gold-crested rock dove within the administrative boundaries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.”

And as one's intuition is usually fine-tuned into trusting Wikipedia, it feels unnervingly consistent within each entry in Halupedia, as it is eerily similar to its inspiration.

The only trouble is some of the racist and distasteful content (as you can see) in the “top folio” and "currently being consulted.” Hopefully, the developers will still be able to overcome this.

We tested the meanderings

So, to test it, Cybernews put a few prompts in, like “Cybersecurity data breach,” among others, but overall, we didn’t find it that funny, as it came off as just AI-generated ramblings.

Still, ever the egomaniac, I decided to persist and go and seek out my roots:

I opted for the first search finding, and it turned out I used to be a weather aberration.

The personality at the top sounds about right, but after a while, I lost interest and decided it would be fun only if I had nothing else to do.

Halupedia can be enjoyable if you’re in a whimsical mood. However, the developers clearly need to sharpen their approach to regulating prejudicial content. Otherwise, it’ll be interesting to see whether this platform takes off or not.

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