Elon Musk launches encyclopedia ‘fact-checked’ by AI and aligning with rightwing views
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/28/elon-musk-grokipediaOpen linkView original on lemmy.world385
Comments75https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/28/elon-musk-grokipediaOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
By definition, encyclopedias are neutral and non-biased, given they contain facts, not opinions. This is propaganda.
Grokaganda
While that is idealy true, the reality of maintaining an ecyclopedia is not always so black and white.
For example, Wikipedia needs to make decisions like whether to call Scientology a religion or a cult, or whether to call homeopathy medicin or pseudo-science. These are value judgements based on criticism to the subject matter and are not fully objective. But they are still important to allow people to get a full picture on a topic.
The alternative would be to relegate criticism on a topic to the criticism section, which runs the risks of giving certain ideas a false sense of legitimacy.
If I had to make a guess, part of the reason why Musk has such an issue with Wikipedia is because they actually have the policy to name criticism up front.
Whether to called homeopathy medicine or pseudoscience is absolutely NOT a value judgement
pseudo science is too kind. Unscientific is more accurate.
I don't know the difference between cults and religions. They both worship weird shit and bullshit stories.
If it doesnt have to pay taxes its a religion i think
That's a very country centric definition
It would make a belief system a religion on one country and a cult in another
Can't scientology be both?
Homeopathy doesn't follow the scientific method - its axiomatic. I don't think its hard to dismiss it as a non-science.
Wouldn't better examples of 'taking sides' be like moral panics etc?
Homeopathy presents its approach as if it were science. Pseudoscience clearly fits
No offense, but your examples of Wikipedia's "Grey area" absolutley pales in comparison to an entire grokipedia that presents absolutely no counter points whatsoever.
If the choice is between:
Or
Then the choice is very much black or white in deciding which is better to use.
I'm not even remotely saying you should use Grokipedia over Wikipedia. I kind of assumed that would be a given, considering the other things I said.
I'm merely pointing out that an encyclopedia isn't just stating dry facts, and that there is certain editorial decisions that need to be made when presenting information.
That does not mean I'm saying Wikipedia is bad and shouldn't be used.
Edit: typo
Thank you for the clarification. This phrasing of yours:
Is almost identical in nature to every bad faith argument used in the last two decades to dismantle public infrastructure in America.
Namely, you say Wikipedia's goal of factual clarity is an ideal that doesn't exist, and then go on to amplify a small problem (factual disagreement) as the reason it's "not always so black and white."
While your point is about encyclopedias in general, that seems buried by your choice of how to phrase that point.
No offense intended by me pointing this out. As you did absolutely clarify at the end of your statement that people should still use Wikipedia.
It's just that the phrasing you used is almost identical to MAGA and how they talk about Wikipedia being woke. I can go on Twitter right now and find several bots talking about how Wikipedia isn't an ideal source of information using the same language and argument you just did.
I appreciate the clarity you provided on what kind of decisions the editors of Wikipedia have to make, but I feel there's likely a better way to phrase it that makes Wikipedia seem stronger rather than weaker because of it.
Yeah, and it's worth clarifying when we assign controversial labels to topics that we do so only insofar as reliable sources already consistently do so. Even if it's an objective statement like "convicted smuggler", that still needs to be balanced with how much that aspect of the subject's life is covered by reliable, independent sources compared to the others. This is pretty similar to how we would treat a benign, neutral statement: we wouldn't write "John Doe is a businessman, politician, and person whose favorite color is orange" absent comparatively lengthy coverage from multiple outlets about Doe's obsession with the color orange.
We have a set of criteria for what constitutes a cult, and scientology is unequivocally a cult. If there's any debate, it's from the church trying to deny the fact.
Likewise, we also have the scientific method that disproves the health claims regularly made by homeopathy practicioners.
Those are things fascists hate.
In itself, yes, but not according to Musk's definition, which he is gradually spreading via this propaganda tool. Unfortunately, this is also very successful, considering how many people already reject science in favor of random and very obvious lies.
The vast wealth of information on the internet should have had an enlightening effect on humanity, but because of influential monsters like Musk, the opposite is unfortunately the case. How they do this can be easily seen here.
Sounds like he told Grok to "rephrase" Wikipedia, then tells it to edit random shit so that it agrees with his views.
I'd bet if you looked up a random neutral topic, there'd be a clear case for plagiarism straight from Wikipedia.
You would be correct. Random page, almost completely identical:
Call of Duty 3 (Wikipedia) Call of Duty 3 (Grokipedia)
Each section has 1-3 words changed, that's it.
So basically, Elon forked Wikipedia and edited the pages that didn't align with the conservative worldview.
Do the word changes line up to an older version of wikipedia. It might be possible to identify who downloaded the copy and block the IP, lol.
IIRC, Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA licensed, generally it’s okay to take, remix, and publish its content, no matter whether you’re using it for good or evil. You just have to Share Alike the results.
But asking a known biased bullshit generator to fact check things is pretty cringe in general.
I wonder if its a one-time fork, or if Musk wants to continue to derive benefit from Wikipedia authors and editors. Is it possible its actually a real-time AI filtering each request? If so that would burn up a massive amount of AI tokens.
It would also present some great methods to tease out exactly how his filters are working. Assuming its real-time, a single wikipedia page could be created with test content with specific words or phrases then a check on the grok version to see if it alters it. A full map could be built of exactly the rules its using.
It can't be a one time fork. Whenever his propaganda changes, he's going to want to give different instructions to his AI and then regenerate the entire encyclopedia like he already did.
It's a different use case from an encyclopedia that is based on facts and the truth.
Its a shame there is no license that forbids AI use. Well, there kind of are but none are common and probably wouldn't hold up in court. Still, it would be nice to attach to work and communicate that the preference is to not have AI reuse
AI is predominantly classified as “fair use” in the US right now, so it wouldn’t even matter if you said “No AI” - copyright does not apply.
That's what I meant by "wouldn't hold up in court". Thanks for filling in the specifics. I wish it wasn't classified as fair us, I think its an unfortunate way to avoid paying people for training data and that's hiding the true cost of the system
You must have misread, grok is doing the fact checking not Elon.
You must have misread, I'm not writing a book, my pen is
I don't get the joke? Mine would make the most sense reading the post I'm responding to and then immediately reading mine.
Grok and Elon are the same thing
O...Kay? I mean that aligns with my joke but it's a bit less funny if you explain it
Oh man, a fully AI edited Wikipedia? This is going to be an unmitigated disaster.
And that's before the Nazi stuff happens with this.
But he thought about it for at least a month! Must be a good idea! (/s)
The far right has always hated wikipedia.
Lemmy even had some weird account who spam posted about how terrible Wikipedia was for a while. Not sure if they stopped or if I just blocked them at some point.
Yeah, for some weird reason, a lot of wingnuts just hated Wikipedia from day one. Not sure how it was orchestrated so fast. Some of the ones pretending to be "independents" were claiming that Wikipedia just could not work, since "anyone can edit it".
But some of the biggest complainers were the kind of babies that think all of the culture has been orchestrated in opposition to their feelings that they hold as "facts". Meaning, if other people don't just accept their worldview as the default centered and correct one, they lose their shit.
We have probably all met people that think their take on "the" bible is not only correct, but self-evident and provable, etc...and naturally, any bullshit morality they want to spin out of that should be just accepted as a "fact", etc...they then proceed to just make up how policy should work in the United States, because first they use bad logic to center their superstitions, just lie outright about how the United States is supposedly a xtian country, etc...and so they spend endless rage spinning on even the dating conventions because their character of Jesus is not put at the center of everything. When they run across something like Wikipedia that isn't as cloistered, it drives them crazy. See also: things like PBS, NPR, universities in general, educated people, and so on...
Do people have quotations about some funky and biased stuff his Wikipedia competitor says? I wanna check it out but am at work
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein
Musk's name appears 11 times.
Grokipedia: https://grokipedia.com/page/Jeffrey_Epstein
Musk's name doesn't appear at all. How interesting.
I once asked chatgpt if Elon was a bigot after laying out all his anti trans behavior and how he acted with his daughter and it was an immediate yes.
I asked grok the same thing, and grok danced around the answer for pages and pages trying to find nuance in it and always denying Musk was a bigot even though it would declare the behavior as bigoted behavior.
I kept at it, and after dozens of replies it finally admitted it.
It also looked like grok was editing replies mid stream, it'd write a few words and it'd delete them and write different words. I could never tell if it was meaningful as it was only a few words at a time, but it was weird.
Why would he do that if he has nothing to hide?
Him and the president were, no doubt, fucking children on that island
That article also lacks the "See edits" button found on many other articles. Guess they got it "right" the first time. Very interesting.
Reality-deprivation by Mecha-Hitler.
So a consev-apedia 2.0? It will be such a feaver dream
I hate alternative facts.
Much like alternative medicine, if its true, its a fact, otherwise its bullshit and/or propaganda.
Honestly looking at a bunch of articles it seems mostly fine, even some facts you’d imagine republicans would disagree with seem to be there and mostly objective. It seems buggy on mobile though half the buttons don’t work, my phone runs hot and I get javascript crashes.
Though it feels written by ai, there is a LOT of text that is ultimately saying the same things over and over, or not really saying anything, greatly inflating the size of articles.
Think about how many times in human history a person in a particular place and time could look around and come to the same conclusion.
Shit waxes and shit wanes. So it goes.
Even this shit is a blip in the grand scheme of things.
It's unlikely humans will die out even in the most extreme climate change scenarios. We'll just be in a much deteriorated state at the poles.
Depends what you mean, seems very unlikely we will eliminate ourselves or human society generally entirely, even in like a worst case nuclear exchange there will be survivors.
Will the new society have pocket computers and air conditioning and a power grid? Fuck no. But I mean there will be humans and societies still
You guys are 1 country. Don't get me wrong you're absolutely working on fucking the rest of us all over too. And if we do need to world war 3 your asses out of this mess you've made it's not good for anyone. But the world is hardly going to end
One reason why my partner and I decided no kids.
Yeah I don't think global society ever restores once large scale open warfare kicks off in a few years/decades. Not sure if it'll be all the nazis or climate death that kicks it off.
Doesn't this dumbass know that there is already Conservapedia?
And that it is already mocked by most people?
I love conservapedia because once you get super deep into it you start realizing the bizarre (even by conservative standards) beliefs of the small number of authors that actually write it. For example, they had a project to rewrite the Bible to remove all the liberal bias in it, and there were several articles that linked Einstein's theory of relativity to moral relativism and included many proofs that it was wrong. There was also the article about how God created oil and put it in the ground to burn and that means it couldn't come from ancient algae and that it can't cause global warming.
God buried dinosaur bones so unbelievers would have somewhat strong to believe in, much like you and I have the Lord God to lean upon!
/s
Nazipedia?
I think this is appropriate. Keep this name prominent.
We've seen before how other systems don't beat Wikipedia. It's an idea that, while not perfect, is incredibly reliable. I'm sure Grok can make its own version. That doesn't make it useful or popular.
Let's all donate to Wikipedia for Christmas. Just to spite Musk. I will.
I've already donated to Wikipedia a few times. A few more times certainly won't hurt.
Wow a whole month! I've planned meals further in advance.
Well, he has a disability.
He has a steaming turd where the brain should be.
You almost have to be grateful to this moron for making it so obvious.
I mean, one of the most significant problems with cloud-based LLMs is that billionaires, the only ones who can afford them, will sooner or later likely gain absolute interpretive power with this tech. OpenAI is also anything but objective on many issues and very obviously gives doctored answers to numerous questions that are unwelcome to its owners. But they and others do it much more subtly – almost so skillfully, in fact, that uncritical people probably don't even notice that they are manipulated.
Musk, on the other hand, takes the same approach as Trump: open crime in full view of the public, since there are no consequences to be expected anyway.
He will probably continue to get away with this without any problems, but at least his disciples cannot claim they did not know.
Nazies doing nazi shit, and the sheep are clapping
The "show edits" button disappears on a lot of pages that are likely to be tampered with by Musk, like political pages. Presumably so it doesn't show "I changed this because I was asked to make this align with right wing views" or something. It's obviously very biased.
"Alternative facts"
Facts in an alternative reality.
Conservapedia already exists
"Slavery was a vital source of employment for Negros..."
This clown again...
I love asking chatgpt questions (mostly about app error codes). Everything I say is "That is correct!", "Nicely explained!", etc. I could say "I farted" and it would reply "Well done!"
“You’re absolutely right!”
Yes I know I’m right. But you have the sum total knowledge of the human race. You should have been right in the first fucking place!
My favorite response was when it told me to change a file's name to the current name.
Biasopedia.
And then you find an article that states "Kamala Harris launches encyclopedia 'fact-checked' by humans and aligning with leftwing views" comes out in response.
In 1984 the government pays Winston to rewrite history. In our timeline, the billionaires rewrite it themselves because they know people will gobble it up without question, no government imposition is needed (although of course they're having the government rewrite history also, but you wonder if it's even needed to brainwash the masses).