Grokipedia: Stupid Or Evil?

Both.

Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash

The world’s richest man, who has positively interacted with Neo-Nazis online, performed several Nazi salutes on stage and was crucial in getting the US’s most orange and authoritarian president into office, wants to dethrone the world’s largest and most popular encyclopedia with his own. But Musk hasn’t got an army of writers to help him knock together a manuscript — after all, what if they unionised against his heinous demands? No, no, too risky. Instead, Musk commanded his Hitler-loving AI to generate his own version, making sure to include utterly nonsensical citations, and then asked that same AI to fact-check itself. Does that not sound horrifically dystopian? But the reality of Grokipedia is far worse than you think.

Let’s start with the basics. What is Grokipedia?

Supposedly, Musk was annoyed by Wikipedia’s “left-wing bias” and so launched Grokipedia on October 27th (and yes, I am late to this story). Unlike Wikipedia, which operates using a democratic process of volunteers generating articles, fact-checking them, and editing them, Grokipedia offloads all these tasks to xAI’s Grok AI model. Visitors to Grokipedia can still edit or flag errors for the AI to correct, but they have no say in how the AI interprets or edits these corrections. In fact, there is evidence that the AI model values these corrections more highly than peer-reviewed evidence, which is the opposite of how human Wikipedia editors complete the process, given that they need accurate citations (with more on that later).

So, if Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that is democratically and carefully assembled and edited, Grok is an encyclopedia spat out by an AI overlord who prefers to listen to “Karens” in the comments more than the experts. What an incredible improvement, Mr. Musk — your genius knows no bounds…

There are so many problems with this approach that it is hard to get a clear picture of just how moronic it actually is.

Musk wants Grokipedia to reveal the “truth” and heavily insinuates it will be unbiased. However, safeguarding and optimisation mean that all AI have pre-programmed biases. Early models, which didn’t have these features, like Microsoft’s ill-fated Tay Twitter bot, quickly devolved into spouting the most extreme, horrific, and biased rhetoric. So, programmers have made sure to include fences for these modern bots to make them less extreme and more usable, as well as to optimise their outputs in better directions. This doesn’t make them less biased but means their bias has been moderately controlled in a specific way. We know Musk is influencing these fences within Grok, so we know it will align with his biases.

Moreover, modern AIs are programmed to output whatever pleases the user, which is why AI psychosis is such a huge problem. Combine this with the fact that we know Grokipedia places heavy emphasis on user comments over expert opinions, and you have a recipe for an encyclopedia that becomes increasingly biased over time, particularly as Grokipedia has been positioned and pushed as an extreme-right alternative to Wikipedia.

It is true that Wikipedia can provide similar biased feedback. However, this is where the pressure on the human editors comes in. They aren’t there to please the commenter (in fact, many do the opposite); instead, they face pressure to only greenlight sources with a credible citation or to highlight when one is lacking. This way, biases are put in the context of their sources, and everything remains mostly grounded in reality, not based on user feelings.

But Grokipedia has citations, so doesn’t it have the same mechanics?

No, because AI can’t give you citations. Let me explain.