What Happened: So, Elon Musk’s new AI-powered encyclopedia, Grokipedia, is already in some serious hot water.
- A new study from researchers at Cornell Tech just came out, and it’s pretty damning. They’re saying the platform is packed with references to super-unreliable and biased sources.
- Grokipedia was launched last month by Musk’s AI company, xAI. It was supposed to be a new rival to Wikipedia – which Musk and others often accuse of having a liberal bias.
- But here’s the kicker: the Cornell study found that Grokipedia is not only ripping a lot of its text straight from Wikipedia, but it’s also citing sources that Wikipedia itself has banned for being total junk.
- The most shocking example they found? Grokipedia had an entry for the “Clinton body count” conspiracy theory. And the source it was citing to back up this long-debunked claim? InfoWars. Yep, that InfoWars.
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Why Is This Important: This whole thing shines a massive, bright light on a huge problem with these new AI information tools: they don’t seem to have any standards for their sources.
- According to the study, the articles on Grokipedia that weren’t just copied from Wikipedia were over 3 times more likely to cite an unreliable source and 13 times more likely to use a source that’s on a blacklist.
- This is a really big deal. An AI platform like this can scale up and spread that kind of conspiracy-laden junk to millions of people in a split second, all without a single human editor ever looking at it.
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Why Should I Care: Look, we’re all starting to rely on AI tools to get us quick facts. But this is the danger.
- When you ask an AI for information, you could be getting a heavy dose of misleading, politically-charged spin, and you’d have no idea.
- It’s blurring the line between a fact and just… something the algorithm made up.
- Plus, it’s worth noting that Musk now controls multiple, massive information platforms – X (Twitter) and this new AI company. That’s a lot of control over what people see and read.
What’s Next: Musk, for his part, has already announced he’s rebranding Grokipedia to “Encyclopedia Galactica” – calling it a “sci-fi version of the Library of Alexandria.” (Yes, really).
- But as the experts are pointing out, you can call it whatever you want. Without real-world accountability and a commitment to using actual, trustworthy sources, it’s just going to be a machine for amplifying misinformation, not correcting it.
- Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation (the folks behind Wikipedia) put out a statement that basically said, “See? This is why we stick with our open, community-run model. It’s the only way to build trust.”