{"id":259377,"date":"2025-11-03T09:06:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T09:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/259377\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T09:06:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T09:06:08","slug":"in-grok-we-dont-trust-academics-assess-elon-musks-ai-powered-encyclopedia-artificial-intelligence-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/259377\/","title":{"rendered":"In Grok we don\u2019t trust: academics assess Elon Musk\u2019s AI-powered encyclopedia | Artificial intelligence (AI)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans<\/a> produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving, studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck\u2019s social policy.<\/p>\n

That was some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched last week by the world\u2019s richest person, Elon Musk<\/a>. The problem was, as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these facts were false.<\/p>\n

It was part of a choppy start for humanity\u2019s latest attempt to corral the sum of human knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of \u201cthe truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth\u201d \u2013 all revealed through the magic of his Grok artificial intelligence model.<\/p>\n

When the multibillionaire switched<\/a> on Grokipedia on Tuesday, he said it was \u201cbetter than Wikipedia\u201d, or \u201cWokepedia\u201d as his supporters call it, reflecting a view that the dominant online encyclopedia often reflects leftwing talking points. One post on X caught the triumphant mood among Musk\u2019s fans: \u201cElon just killed Wikipedia. Good riddance.\u201d<\/p>\n

But users found Grokipedia lifted large chunks from the website it intended to usurp, contained numerous factual errors and seemed to promote Musk\u2019s favoured rightwing talking points. In between posts on X promoting his creation, Musk this week declared \u201ccivil war in Britain is inevitable\u201d, called for the English \u201cto ally with the hard men\u201d such as the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and said only the far-right AfD party could \u201csave Germany\u201d.<\/p>\n

Musk was so enamoured of his AI-encyclopedia he said he planned to one day etch the \u201ccomprehensive collection of all knowledge\u201d into a stable oxide and \u201cplace copies \u2026 in orbit, the moon and Mars to preserve it for the future\u201d.<\/p>\n

Evans, however, was discovering that Musk\u2019s use of AI to weigh and check facts was suffering a more earth-bound problem. \u201cChatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,\u201d Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, told the Guardian, after being invited to test out Grokipedia. \u201cAI just hoovers up everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richard Evans said Grokipedia\u2019s entry for Albert Speer (pictured on Hitler\u2019s left) repeated lies and distortions spread by the Nazi munitions minister himself. Photograph: Picture library<\/p>\n

He noted its entry for Albert Speer, Hitler\u2019s architect and wartime munitions minister, repeated lies and distortions spread by Speer even though they had been corrected in a 2017 award-winning biography. The site\u2019s entry on the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose biography Evans wrote, claimed wrongly he experienced German hyperinflation in 1923, that he was an officer in the Royal Corps of Signals and didn\u2019t mention that he had been married twice, Evans said.<\/p>\n

The problem, said David Larsson Heidenblad, the deputy director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge<\/a> in Sweden, was a clash of knowledge cultures.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe live in a moment where there is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is more trustworthy than human-to-human insight,\u201d Heidenblad said. \u201cThe Silicon Valley mindset is very different from the traditional scholarly approach. Its knowledge culture is very iterative where making mistakes is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, the academic world is about building trust over time and scholarship over long periods during which the illusion that you know everything cracks. Those are real knowledge processes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grokipedia\u2019s arrival continues a centuries-old encyclopedia tradition from the 15th-century Chinese Yongle scrolls to the Encyclop\u00e9die, an engine for spreading controversial enlightenment views in 18th-century France. These were followed by the anglophone-centric Encyclopedia Britannica and, since 2001, the crowd-sourced Wikipedia<\/a>. But Grokipedia is the first to be largely created by AI and this week a question swirled: who controls the truth when AIs, steered by powerful individuals, are holding the pen?<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it\u2019s Musk doing it then I am afraid of political manipulation,\u201d said the cultural historian Peter Burke, emeritus professor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who in 2000 wrote A Social History of Knowledge<\/a> since the time of Johannes Gutenberg\u2019s 15th-century printing press.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am sure some of it will be overt to some readers, but the problem may be that other readers may miss it,\u201d Burke said. The anonymity of many encyclopedia entries often gave them \u201can air of authority it shouldn\u2019t have\u201d, he added.<\/p>\n

Andrew Dudfield, the head of AI at Full Fact, a UK-based factchecking organisation, said: \u201cWe really have to consider whether an AI-generated encyclopedia \u2013 a facsimile of reality, run through a filter \u2013 is a better proposition than any of the previous things that we have. It doesn\u2019t display the same transparency but it is asking for the same trust. It is not clear how far the human hand is involved, how far it is AI=generated and what content the AI was trained on. It is hard to place trust in something when you can\u2019t see how those choices are made.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Musk had been encouraged to launch Grokipedia by, among others, Donald Trump\u2019s tech adviser, David Sacks, who complained Wikipedia was \u201chopelessly biased\u201d and maintained by \u201can army of leftwing activists\u201d.<\/p>\n

Grokipedia called the far-right organisation Britain First a \u2018patriotic political party\u2019, which pleased its leader, Paul Golding (left), who in 2018 was jailed for anti-Muslim hate crimes. Photograph: Gareth Fuller\/PA<\/p>\n

Until as recently as 2021, Musk has supported Wikipedia, tweeting on its 20th birthday: \u201cSo glad you exist.\u201d But by October 2023 his antipathy towards the platform led him to offer \u00a31bn \u201cif they change their name to Dickipedia\u201d.<\/p>\n

Yet many of the 885,279 articles available on Grokipedia in its first week were lifted almost word for word from Wikipedia, including its entries on the PlayStation 5, the Ford Focus and Led Zeppelin. Others, however, differed significantly:<\/p>\n

Grokipedia\u2019s entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine<\/a> cited the Kremlin as a prominent source and quoted the official Russian terminology about \u201cdenazifying\u201d Ukraine, protecting ethnic Russians and neutralising threats to Russian security. By contrast, Wikipedia said Putin espoused imperialist views and \u201cbaselessly claimed that the Ukrainian government were neo-Nazis\u201d.<\/p>\n

Grokipedia called the far-right organisation Britain First a \u201cpatriotic political party\u201d<\/a>, which pleased its leader, Paul Golding, who in 2018 was jailed for anti-Muslim hate crimes<\/a>. Wikipedia, on the other hand, called it \u201cneo-fascist\u201d and a \u201chate group\u201d.<\/p>\n

Grokipedia called the 6 January 2021 turmoil<\/a> at the US Capitol in Washington DC a \u201criot\u201d, not an attempted coup, and said<\/a> there were \u201cempirical underpinnings\u201d to the idea that a deliberate demographic erasure of white people in western nations is being orchestrated through mass immigration. This is a notion that critics consider to be a conspiracy theory.<\/p>\n

Grokipedia said Donald Trump\u2019s conviction for falsifying business records<\/a> in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case was handed down \u201cafter a trial in a heavily Democratic jurisdiction\u201d, and there was no mention of his conflicts of interest \u2013 for example receiving a jet from Qatar<\/a> or the Trump family cryptocurrency businesses.<\/p>\n

Grokipedia called the 6 January 2021 turmoil<\/a> at the US Capitol in Washington DC a \u2018riot\u2019 and not an attempted coup. Photograph: Leah Millis\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Wikipedia responded coolly to the launch of Grokipedia, saying it was still trying to understand how Grokipedia worked.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnlike newer projects, Wikipedia\u2019s strengths are clear,\u201d a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation said. \u201cIt has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.\u201d<\/p>\n

xAI did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-259377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}