Wikipedia co-founder reacts to Musk’s Grokipedia announcement

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00:00Elon Musk announced he's creating Grokipedia, a competitor to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

00:06The big difference is Grokipedia will be driven with AI, while Wikipedia allows users to make

00:12edits to entries using certain approved sources.

00:14Musk said in a post on X,

00:16"...will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia.

00:19Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the XAI goal of understanding the universe."

00:25Straight Arrow News interviewed Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger about the announcement.

00:29Here's what he had to say.

00:32How do you feel about Elon Musk trying to build a competitor?

00:36Well, I hope he does a good job.

00:39I'm happy about it.

00:40I think that's great.

00:44The more encyclopedias in the world there are, the happier I am, I suppose, unless they're

00:52extremely irresponsible.

00:57I do worry, however, that Grokpedia, or whatever it's going to be called, will reflect the

01:07same sort of biases that Wikipedia has and that the Grok chatbot LLM has reflected.

01:20So in the last year or so, the Grok, actually shortly after it rolled out, it started drifting

01:31to the left.

01:31And in the last six months, if you ask it a question on anything remotely political, anything having

01:40to do with the culture war, it answers from a left-wing perspective.

01:49It's pretty annoying unless you actually support that.

01:53Yeah.

01:54What do you make of the use of AI to build something like this?

01:57I've anticipated it for quite a while, for over a couple of years, I've been thinking

02:03about what's going to happen.

02:07I do think that AI can be used to write a decent encyclopedia article.

02:13I've done it myself.

02:16I've observed others using it to add articles to encyclopedias.

02:23So I know it can be done, and it can be done reasonably well.

02:27You said, when I asked you this original question about Grokpedia and XAI, you said, I hope he

02:33does it right.

02:35What is your advice to make sure he does it right?

02:38Well, there are these prompts that are in the background when you make a query to a chatbot.

02:53So you type in your prompt, but then it's wrapped essentially by another prompt.

03:02And then the whole thing is submitted to the LLM, to the system.

03:09And it's possible to edit that wrapping so that it elicits a more fair and balanced sort

03:21of response.

03:22I would like to see that in Grok, and I would like to see that reflected in Grokpedia.

03:32But I'm not sure that we're going to see that.

03:34I think Elon Musk and his people know that, of course, it's possible to edit those background

03:48prompts.

03:49I forget what they're called.

03:52But they clearly are not.

03:56They have not.

03:59Let's just put it this way.

04:00They have to know that the system as it exists now has the sort of biased result.

04:09And therefore, I think they must intend it.

04:13And if they intend it, that means that they're probably going to come up with a similarly biased

04:22encyclopedia.

04:23I hope not.

04:24I hope I'm wrong.

04:25But this is what I suspect.

04:26I'm Ray Bogan for Straight Arrow News.

04:29For more reporting straight from our nation's capital, download the SAN app.

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