Last month, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia as a competitor to what he called the “woke” Wikipedia. His new site would “purge out the propaganda” flooding his much more established rival, the oafish X owner claimed.
The site has a less than auspicious start, its entry on its own owner saying Musk’s public persona “blends innovative visionary with irreverent provocateur” and featuring details of his diet, noting his consumption of “occasional indulgences like morning donuts and multiple Diet Cokes daily”, and nothing stronger.
But more worryingly, analysis by researchers at Cornell University in the US has now shown that Grokipedia cites a neo-Nazi website 42 times, along with numerous other sites that experts, and Wikipedia, shun as unreliable or hate-filled.
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Grokipedia cites the neo-Nazi site Stormfront as a source 42 times, the conspiracy theory site Infowars 34 times and the white nationalist site VDare 107 times, all as if they were neutral chroniclers of information. All such sites are forbidden by Wikipedia from being used by contributors as references, even as primary sources of information about racist ideas or conspiracy theories.
Overall, the researchers found that Grokipedia includes 12,522 citations to online sources which previous academic research has deemed as having very low credibility. Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia centralises its editing process, with xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, controlling whether or not a certain edit is approved and implemented.
In addition, the researchers found that the Grokipedia entry for Adolf Hitler manages to go on for fully 13,000 words before it mentions the Holocaust by name, while Wikipedia mentions it in the first paragraph of its article. And, funnily enough, the article on Musk himself does not mention his hand gesture at a rally in January that many regarded as a Nazi salute. Still, at least he’s purging out the propaganda that so affects his mainstream rival!
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