Academics and fact-checkers have slammed Elon Musk’s new AI-powered encyclopedia known as Grokipedia for containing several errors, lifting content and endorsing political bias.
As reported by the Cryptopolitan, Grokipedia was launched last week with claims it would “kill Wikipedia.”
Musk launched the encyclopedia himself, further claiming that it was the antidote to “Wokepedia” and “better than Wikipedia.” This comes as the tech billionaire placed his Grokepedia as the anthology of “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” generated by his Grok AI model.
Grokipedia faces challenges from the start
Despite the hype, Musk’s encyclopedia has started off marred by a myriad of challenges, including inaccuracies. An eminent British historian and expert on the Third Reich, Sir Richard Evans found that his own Grokipedia entry was almost entirely untrue.
It incorrectly listed his doctoral supervisor, his role as Regius professor of history at Cambridge, and his thesis work.
“AI just hoovers everything,” Evans told the Guardian after finding the encyclopedia gave “chatroom contributions equal status with serious academic work.”
He also noted other momentous errors, including the entry for Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, which repeated long-debunked lies. According to the Guardian report, the entry for Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was also full of false claims about his life.
A deputy director of the Lund Centre for History of Knowledge in Sweden, David Larsson Heidenblad called it a “a clash of knowledge and cultures,” with the problems stemming from a flawed approach to information.
“The Silicon Valley mindset is very different from the traditional scholarly approach. Its knowledge culture is very iterative where making mistakes is a feature, not a bug.”
Heidenblad.
“By contrast, the academic world is about building trust over time and scholarship over long periods during which the illusion that you know everything cracks. Those are real knowledge processes,” added Heidenblad.
Musk’s Grokipedia is reportedly the first major encyclopedia to be largely created by AI, which has raised concerns about who controls the information when AI models, controlled by powerful individuals, are “holding the pen.”
Peter Burke, emeritus professor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge said: “If it’s Musk doing it, then I am afraid of political manipulation.”
According to the Guardian, these comments were also amplified as Musk, while promoting Grokipedia on X declared that “civil war in Britain is inevitable,” and called for an alliance with far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and also said that the far-right AfD party could “save Germany.”
Apart from the factual errors, users also discovered that Grokipedia directly lifted chunks of text from Wikipedia, the same site it intended to overtake.
Andrew Dudfield, the head of AI at Full Fact, a UK-based fact-checking organization criticized Grokipedia for its lack of transparency.
“It is not clear how far the human hand is involved, how far it is AI-generated and what content the AI was trained on.”
Dudfield.
“It is hard to place trust in something when you can’t see how those choices are made,” he added.
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