Elon Musk's Wikipedia Alternative: Grokipedia Released with 885,000 Articles
Wikipedia is a thorn in Elon Musk's side; at the beginning of the month, he announced an AI-generated alternative. This Grokipedia is now available.
(Image: miss.cabul/Shutterstock.com)
A few weeks after the announcement, Elon Musk's AI company xAI has released the very first version of the AI-generated Wikipedia alternative, Grokipedia. The online encyclopedia runs under version number 0.1 and currently comprises approximately 885,000 English-language articles. Although it is therefore only about 10 percent of the size of English-language Wikipedia and, unlike Wikipedia, has no translations, claims the US billionaire that it is already better. Meanwhile, articles have already been found that are complete copies of their Wikipedia variants, and Grokipedia only includes unillustrated texts, some of which are extremely long.
Dissatisfaction with Wikipedia content
Musk had only announced the in-house Wikipedia alternative at the beginning of the month; he has long considered Wikipedia to be not objective, with a left-wing political orientation. However, he himself has long been known for clearly right-wing views. The AI Grok, which underlies Grokipedia, has caused scandals multiple times this year with Holocaust denial. Musk's company had blamed programming errors for this, but analyses have shown that corrections behind the scenes have strongly influenced the AI's responses. Not only Musk has long been bothered by the fact that Wikipedia, as the largest freely accessible collection of human-created texts, is frequently used for training AI models and its orientation is allegedly influenced by this.
Shortly after the release of Grokipedia v0.1, articles were found there that were apparently copied one-to-one from Wikipedia and under the intended license. A corresponding note can be found, for example, under the article on the game console Playstation 5. The US magazine Wired has meanwhile has compiled a series of examples showing how right-wing and far-right content is integrated into Grokipedia; for instance, the article on slavery includes a long passage justifying it. The articles state when the facts listed there were last checked by Grok. However, AI software is known for generating plausible-sounding but false information.
Videos by heise
Speaking to The Verge, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, which is responsible for Wikipedia, has now stated that they are still trying to understand Grokipedia. At the same time, she points to the enormous importance of their encyclopedia, which is the only one of the most frequently visited internet sites operated by a non-profit organization. The knowledge compiled there is and will always remain human. People from a wide variety of backgrounds cooperate to compile a living record of human knowledge there. There have already been many attempts to build an alternative, none of which influence their mission.
(mho)
