Can Elon Musk’s AI-generated “Grokipedia” be trusted? • FRANCE 24 English
Emerald Maxwell is here in studio. Emerald, you’ve been taking a closer look at Elon Musk’s new website, Groipedia. He’s just launched it to compete with Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, that he and others on the right accuse of ideological bias. So, Emerald Musk is touting that his website is unbiased. What do you think is it? Well, Elon Musk launched his new online encyclopedia on his social media platform X, declaring that its goal is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And he called this version 0.1. Um, he said that version 1.0 will be 10 times better, but even at 0.1, it’s better than Wikipedia already. users of of Groipedia will find this homepage when they open it up, which is essentially a search bar. Um, and we can also see that it’s home to around 885,000 AI generated articles. That’s compared to Wikipedia’s nearly 8 million human written entries. Like Wikipedia, it’s free to use. And if you enter a search term, you land on a page that looks a lot like Wikipedia with headings, uh, chapters, um, and references, but minus the pictures. Musk though says that his version is designed to purge the propaganda flooding Wikipedia. So to try and answer the question of whether it does in fact do that, uh why don’t we take a like start with the entry on Elon Musk himself in both encyclopedias and the least that can be said is that Grocipedia paints Musk in a flattering light. Here he is um I quote uh described as a blend of innovative visionary with irreverent provocator. But uh Graedia also emits several of his controversies. Uh, for instance, the Wikipedia page on Musk includes a couple of paragraphs explaining the controversy around an arm gesture he made earlier this year that many compared to a Nazi salute. Musk was very critical about that being on Wikipedia and notably, the incident does not make an appearance on Groipedia. Social media users have also been checking out Groipedia for themselves and been weighing in on this uh question of of its bias. And for instance, when it comes to Gaza, this expost highlights that Groipedia does not have a page for Gaza genocide like Wikipedia does. Um, only for Palestinian genocide accusation. Um, where most of the text is dedicated to Israel’s narrative and largely ignores that the genocide um has been uh recognized by international bodies and that recognition continues to grow. Other examples of Groipedia showing a bias is its entry on George Floyd. Uh so on Wikipedia, the very first line describes Floyd as an African-American man who was murdered by a white police officer during an arrest. In contrast, Groipedia reads, uh Floyd was an American man with a lengthy criminal record, including convictions for armed robbery, drug possession, and theft in Texas. which is a a strange way to start the article uh because that is absolutely not what he’s known for. Of course, Groipedia also writes that Black Lives Matter protests led to widespread riots that caused uh massive property damage, the uh costliest in insurance history without mentioning, as Wikipedia does, that the vast majority of the protests were peaceful. These Gawkipedia entries and others on topics such as transgender people reveal a marked right-wing bias and seem to align with Elon Musk’s views. Sharon, so how then did this whole Groipedia project come about exactly, Emerald? Well, because of Elon Musk basically, um, who, like a growing number of people on the right in America, have been attacking Wikipedia for some time, accusing it of liberal bias. In 2024, the world’s richest man accused the site of being controlled by far-left activists and called for people to stop donating to the site. And so his answer has been to use his AI company a XAI to develop a rival, which ironically appears to be heavily relying on Wikipedia, copying most pages almost word for word because of course all AI bots scrape uh Wikipedia for knowledge. However, we know that Musk has already tweaked his uh chat uh AI bot Grock to lean further to the right and clearly that bias has heaped into his encyclopedia too. AI is definitely a threat to Wikipedia. But for now, the site remains one of the most visited websites in the in the world. Um and it and it has come under criticism in its 25 year history for being crowdsourced and inaccurate. But today, it’s generally recognized as one of the most uh trusted, reliable sources on the web in a sea of ads and spam and disinformation. Several studies have looked at potential political bias across Wikipedia, and some find a moderate leftward tilt, but studies also suggest that its strength comes from the fact that it’s crowdsourced with articles becoming more neutral over time due to community revisions. And all of this also begs the question uh Sharon um do we trust humans or AI to be less biased? and thanks so much
In this edition of Truth or Fake we look at Elon Musk’s new website Grokipedia, which he has just launched to compete with Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that he and others on the American right have accused of left-wing bias. Musk touts AI-generated Grokipedia as unbiased; is it really?
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