Grokipedia\u2019s entry on gender, for instance, began with the sentence: \u201cGender refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex….\u201d <\/p>\n
Wikipedia\u2019s starts with: \u201cGender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioural aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender\u201d.<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s own Grokipedia entry differed strikingly from the Wikipedia page on the same subject. <\/p>\n
It described some of his pursuits in breathless terms, saying his pushes for artificial intelligence \u201cemphasise AI safety through truth-oriented development rather than heavy regulation\u201d and that certain \u201creleases reflect xAI\u2019s rapid iteration, with Musk highlighting Grok\u2019s design for maximal truth-seeking and reduced censorship\u201d, citing xAI\u2019s own website to make that point.<\/p>\n
On the section about Musk\u2019s work in the United States Doge Service, it included an error regarding Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who left the group before it became part of Trump\u2019s Administration in January: \u201cPost-departure, the initiative emphasised sustained, less aggressive efficiencies, with Ramaswamy assuming a more prominent role\u201d.<\/p>\n
In contrast to Wikipedia\u2019s \u201cAccolades\u201d section, Musk\u2019s Grokipedia page concluded with a section titled \u201cRecognition and Long-Term Vision\u201d that expounded on his beliefs: \u201cHis long-term vision prioritises safeguarding human consciousness against existential threats, emphasising the establishment of a self-sustaining multi-planetary civilisation as a hedge against planetary-scale catastrophes on Earth,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
The project is Musk\u2019s latest bid to harness Grok, the ChatGPT-like AI system developed by his company xAI, to offer right-leaning, freewheeling alternatives to popular mainstream tech tools.<\/p>\n
At launch, Grokipedia\u2019s homepage boasted that the site has about 885,000 articles, whereas the English-language Wikipedia has more than eight million.<\/p>\n
The site went live without fanfare or explanation, a week after the date Musk had initially set for its launch. <\/p>\n
On October 20, he said he was postponing the launch to the end of that week, explaining: \u201cWe need to do more work to purge out the propaganda\u201d. He has not publicly posted about it since.<\/p>\n
A minimalist homepage bore the title \u201cGrokipedia v0.1\u201d and a search bar where users could type in queries.<\/p>\n
Grokipedia\u2019s articles appeared to be derived from the same large language model that underlies the Grok chatbot on X, formerly Twitter, which Musk purchased and renamed in 2022. <\/p>\n
That could mean it has access, at least in theory, to the latest X posts from the site\u2019s hundreds of millions of users, which it can use to inform articles and keep them up-to-date.<\/p>\n
It could also make Grokipedia prone to the sort of high-profile gaffes that have dogged the Grok chatbot at times. <\/p>\n
Earlier this year, the bot began spouting a conspiracy theory about \u201cwhite genocide\u201d in South Africa in response to unrelated questions. <\/p>\n
In other instances, it has spewed anti-Semitic slurs, generated images that virtually \u201cundressed\u201d female X users, and confidently misdiagnosed an injury. In each case, Musk or X blamed coding errors and eventually remedied the issue.<\/p>\n
In 2017, Musk tweeted: \u201cI love Wikipedia. Just gets better over time\u201d. The billionaire entrepreneur soured on the site in recent years, taking issue at times with how its \u201cElon Musk\u201d article portrayed him and accusing it of liberal bias as Musk\u2019s own politics grew more conservative. <\/p>\n
Earlier this year he tweeted: \u201cDefund Wikipedia until balance is restored!\u201d<\/p>\n
The owner of X and xAI has joined a chorus of right-leaning critics, including an ousted Wikipedia co-founder, who say the online encyclopedia \u2013 which has a policy of remaining neutral on ideological debates \u2013 too often holds up a liberal lens to hot-button issues such as climate science, vaccines, and the Israel-Gaza conflict. <\/p>\n
Musk announced his intention to build Grokipedia on September 29, in response to an X post from President Donald Trump\u2019s AI tsar, Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, who called Wikipedia \u201chopelessly biased\u201d.<\/p>\n
Before Grokipedia\u2019s launch, some observers said they expected it to draw heavily on Wikipedia for its content.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery major AI system trains on Wikipedia\u2019s freely licensed knowledge,\u201d said Stephen Harrison, a journalist and author who has covered Wikipedia extensively. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe irony is that Grokipedia will be built on the unpaid labour of the volunteer Wikipedia editors Musk has gone out of his way to vilify.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an interview with the Post last week, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said he would be curious to see Grokipedia when it launched but didn\u2019t have high expectations.<\/p>\n
AI language models \u201caren\u2019t good enough to write encyclopedia articles\u201d, Wales said. \u201cThere will be a lot of errors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor\u2019s Picks<\/a>, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week\u2019s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Grokipedia\u2019s entry on gender, for instance, began with the sentence: \u201cGender refers to the binary classification of humans…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[75798,48745,138,2245,17448,75797,75796,50048,293,1743,1739,17449,111,139,69,1642,2847,5429,1041,1857,2249,1324,1361,1865,13020,21732,51235,19135,13632],"class_list":["post-104562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-afterwards","tag-briefly","tag-business","tag-early","tag-elon","tag-encyclopaedia","tag-extols","tag-grokipedia","tag-his","tag-launched","tag-launches","tag-musk","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-online","tag-only","tag-own","tag-rival","tag-site","tag-soon","tag-stop","tag-that","tag-today","tag-version","tag-vision","tag-wikipedia","tag-working","tag-written"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}