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Just when you thought he must have run out of fingers to stick into pies, the world\u2019s richest man goes and sprouts another one. This week Elon Musk proudly launched his latest venture \u2014 not electric cars, not space exploration, not satellites, not tunnels, not social media, not brain implants, not the rolling back of the administrative state, not a new political party, but something altogether more fundamental: a new version of the truth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe goal here is to create an open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge,\u201d Musk posted on X<\/a> on Tuesday, a day after his xAI company rolled out its first 0.1 version of Grokipedia, an AI-powered online encyclopedia. \u201cThen place copies of that etched in a stable oxide in orbit, the Moon and Mars to preserve it for the future. Foundation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n You know, because understandings of what is and isn\u2019t true \u2014 and about how to capture the whole truth of a given subject \u2014 have famously always just been the kind of straightforward, uncomplicated and static thing that\u2019s really well-suited to being etched on to something that cannot be changed and launched into space. Er, foundation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Musk, who has called Wikipedia, on which Grokipedia is modelled, \u201cWokepedia\u201d and has described the site as \u201can extension of legacy media propaganda\u201d, demonstrates a facile understanding of human knowledge. After all, even our best approximations of what is true are constantly shifting, as new facts and developments emerge, and as the values that shape our understanding change. <\/p>\n Does he have a point about some Wikipedia articles having a \u201cliberal\u201d or left-leaning bias that obscures or fails to provide a full and fair version of the truth, though? Yes. Just look up the \u201cCOVID-19 Lab leak theory<\/a>\u201d entry as an example. Despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans in a 2023 study by YouGov and the Economist said they believed the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory<\/a> and not, as originally thought, a wet market, this is described in the second sentence as a \u201chighly controversial\u201d claim, while it is stated that \u201cmany scenarios proposed for a lab leak are characteristic of conspiracy theories\u201d \u2014 as if there were not legitimate<\/a> and non-conspiratorial reasons for believing in it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Indeed, last month one of the website\u2019s two co-founders, Larry Sanger, wrote a long essay<\/a> arguing that some of the standards that the site \u2014 which uses thousands of volunteer editors \u2014 was founded upon were being \u201csacrificed in favor of ideology\u201d, and suggested nine ways to fix it.\u00a0<\/p>\n But funnily enough, none of Sanger\u2019s suggestions included setting up an AI-powered, low-quality, barely readable Wikipedia rip-off with a peculiar penchant for Musk and his worldview. And yet that\u2019s what we have in the shape of Grokipedia.\u00a0<\/p>\n Go and have a poke around in it and you will see what I mean. You will find Tommy Robinson<\/a> described as a \u201ccitizen journalist\u201d in glowing terms in the very first sentence of his entry. You will see Elon Musk\u2019s 20lb weight loss highlighted in his entry as if that were important information, and you will find out that can be attributed to intermittent fasting (rather than to Mounjaro<\/a>). You will read Kremlin talking points in the first paragraph of the entry on Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, like the idea that the former is \u201cdenazifying\u201d the latter. You might also be somewhat mystified \u2014 given its purported role in propagating legacy media propaganda \u2014 to find that, often, \u201ccontent is adapted from Wikipedia\u201d.<\/p>\n Instead of setting up a serious challenger to Wikipedia, Musk has scored a major own goal. Grokipedia demonstrates that, while humans might be highly imperfect, biased and tribal beings, they are still better than AI at getting to the truth (even when a majority of them have \u201cliberal\u201d biases) and it shows that, in a world in which stores of trust are so depleted, in which it\u2019s so hard to know what\u2019s real and what is fake, a site like Wikipedia is more important than ever.<\/p>\n Even Grok, the xAI chatbot the new site is named after, told me that \u201cwhile Grokipedia improves on specific Wikipedia flaws \u2014 like verbose, overly critical entries on conservative topics \u2014 its AI gatekeeping creates a centralised \u2018Musk\u2019s truth\u2019 filter, lacking Wikipedia\u2019s distributed checks\u201d, and that \u201cit trades one set of biases for another, often with less accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n Quite. But Musk\u2019s crusades will surely continue. Actually, I\u2019m quite surprised he hasn\u2019t already set up his own AI-powered, tOtAlLy uNbIaSeD newspaper that automates all the wonderfully simple processes our industry has spent centuries honing, which he can then etch on to some stable oxide and propel into orbit too. Watch this (outer) space.<\/p>\n