Musk launches Grokipedia to rival 'left-biased' Wikipedia

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00:00Well, let's talk now about the situation regarding Elon Musk launching something called Grokipedia.

00:08It's a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that the billionaire seeks to position survival to.

00:14Yes, Wikipedia. It all rhymes.

00:16Writing on social media, Musk said that grokipedia.com version 0.1 is now live.

00:22He promised that version 1.0 will be better by 10 times.

00:26I think I'm reading that correctly.

00:27Grokipedia's goal is the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, said Musk.

00:32But there are doubts about this statement.

00:34Grok has made many errors and has shown a marked far-right bias, much like Musk and his friends.

00:40So is this a new way to get to the heart of the matter?

00:42Or a platform to spread bias and propaganda masquerading as an information tool?

00:47I'll just set that up for you in bringing out Kevin Gordyoussani, our foreign editor,

00:50who's got a far more prescient analysis of this situation.

00:54Kevin Gordyoussani, I'll throw it to you with this.

00:57Grok's made mistakes on Twitter.

01:00Could we trust a Grokipedia?

01:03Look, obviously it is powered in large part by Grok.

01:07So any mistakes that Grok would make, Grokipedia would likely make.

01:12But I think the mistakes is one thing.

01:14And then there is the question, as you mentioned, that quote from Elon Musk,

01:19the question about whether it will say the truth or not.

01:24And as Elon Musk said that this was going to say the truth and only the truth and nothing but the truth,

01:30he also said that it was meant to purge out all propaganda.

01:34And that is exactly what he's trying to do, which is go against Wikipedia,

01:40that he, his followers, and a lot of people in the United States on the right wing

01:46and in MAGA circles, Make America Great Again, have said that Wikipedia is woke.

01:53Wikipedia has a liberal bias and that you cannot trust Wikipedia

01:57because it's simply regurgitating the biases of the left-wing traditional media.

02:03And so what Elon Musk is trying to do is counter that.

02:08And he said it very openly.

02:10But when you look at some of the entries of Grokipedia,

02:15it's very interesting to see that there is a tilt towards the right wing and even the far right.

02:20There are two examples that have been widely commented on a line.

02:24The first one is the entry about Adolf Hitler.

02:27If you look at the entry on Wikipedia, in the first paragraph, you have a mention of the Holocaust,

02:34the genocide of six million Jews under Adolf Hitler.

02:38Look at the Grokipedia entry and the mention of the Holocaust only comes at the very end of the second paragraph,

02:48way after a comment about how Hitler achieved rapid economic recovery for Germany.

02:56So you see that the order in which things are presented here are very different.

03:02Another very interesting example is the entry about George Floyd.

03:07On Wikipedia, the first line of the entry tells you that George Floyd was a black man,

03:14an African-American man who was murdered by a white police officer.

03:18You look at the Grokipedia entry and the first line is about the fact that he has a lengthy or had a lengthy criminal record.

03:28You do not see in the first two paragraph that he was an African-American man.

03:33You do not know that the police officer was white.

03:37And you have to wait pretty much towards the end of the second paragraph to even know that Derek Chauvin,

03:44the police officer, was responsible for the murder and convicted and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

03:50So there again, a lot of biases, if you will, towards the right.

03:55There are other problems with Grokipedia.

03:57One is that it's powered by AI.

04:00So sometimes it gives the facts.

04:02Sometimes it gives mistake.

04:03And the other criticism, this time from Wikipedia, is that, well,

04:07Grokipedia sometimes is simply repeating word for word what it finds on Wikipedia,

04:12because Wikipedia is available publicly and AI uses some of that information.

04:17But already you're seeing in the sort of right wing online community,

04:22a lot of praise for Elon Musk for starting Grokipedia,

04:26because again, going back to the original criticism of Wikipedia on the right,

04:31which is we are going to build something that is factual.

04:35And actually what they're doing is trying to build something that is, in their words,

04:40going to counter the liberal biases of Wikipedia.

04:43It is telling things along their propaganda or bias guideline, isn't it?

04:48And that's a very alarming road to be taking, in my opinion, as a humble journalist.

04:55Kerevan, what does all this say about Elon Musk and his involvement in the information space?

05:00Well, this is really the latest attempt by Elon Musk to sort of offer right-leaning versions

05:08of available technological tools.

05:11And you saw the first example of that when he took over Twitter and made it X.

05:16The first thing he did was reinstate right-wing figures that had been suspended

05:20or banned by Twitter at the time for spreading misinformation, for inciting violence,

05:27including one person known as Donald Trump, the current president of the United States,

05:33who was suspended by Twitter back after the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.

05:39Grok is another example of that.

05:42Elon Musk has been public about the fact that sometimes he was asking Grok to tweak some of

05:48its answers because he didn't like the answers.

05:50One famous example was the question, what is the greatest threat to civilization?

05:54The initial answer from Grok was misinformation and disinformation.

05:59Elon Musk on X commented under that response saying, that's a stupid response.

06:04I'll take care of it.

06:06The next day, you had a new answer from Grok to the same question.

06:10This time, the greatest threat to civilization was the demographic collapse due to low fertility rates.

06:17We know that Elon Musk is very interested in fertility and in the propagation of population

06:23around the world and especially in the United States.

06:26All of this is more broadly in line with the fight by the right wing in the United States

06:34of trying to take control of the information because, and this is an old saying,

06:41is if you control information, if you control knowledge, you have the power.

06:45Information is power.

06:47Scary, isn't it?

06:48Yeah.

06:48I can't believe you.

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