Donald Trump’s former friend and hype man, Elon Musk, recently unveiled Grokipedia, an artificial intelligence-powered alternative to Wikipedia. But unlike Wikipedia, which benefits humanity as a free and volunteer-based online encyclopedia, Musk’s Grokipedia only benefits far-right and conspiracy theorists.
From Justification of Slavery to Anti-Trans Propaganda
Since Grokipedia went live on Monday, numerous media outlets explored how this AI encyclopedia handles some sensitive topics. The results were not great. As Wired pointed out, the entry on slavery in the United States contains a section titled “Ideological Justifications for Slavery” and a sub-section “Shift from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.” It also connects gay pornography to the “HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.” Furthermore, its entry on “Transgender” goes out of its way to refer to trans women as “biological males identifying as female.”
It also appears to embrace conspiracy theories in the way you would expect from a conservative encyclopedia. For example, unlike Wikipedia, it doesn’t label “white genocide” as the conspiracy theory that it is. Instead, it only refers to it as “white genocide theory.” The entry on the events of the January 6 United States Capitol attack cites “widespread claims of voting irregularities” and doesn’t mention Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy theory about “rigged voting machines.”
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World’s Knowledge According to AI
Wikipedia contains vast amounts of the world’s knowledge. Almost any term, object, or event that you type into its search will yield some results. You might not learn everything you would want, but at least you’ll get a starting point. Also, all the information is provided by humans. They are the ones who type in the words, review entries, and provide sources. Its alternative is starkly different.
Grokipedia is entirely written by artificial intelligence. It contains the world’s knowledge, the way artificial intelligence sees it. This means rehashed and rephrased information, where context is easily lost and key points are omitted. In a lot of instances, it also copies entries in Wikipedia from word to word. As the dive into content on Grokipedia continues, a lot of other issues associated with AI will appear, like “false facts.” At that point, the far-right would probably celebrate it even more.
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Just Another Musk’s Attempt to Get Power
Musk is all about getting more power. He is trying to control space, transportation, social media, and whatnot. Somewhere along the way, Musk realized that he also wanted to control the knowledge. “The impulse to control knowledge is as old as knowledge itself,” said Ryan McGrady, researcher at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst. “Controlling what gets written is a way to gain or keep power.”
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