From publishing falsehoods to pushing far-right ideology, Grokipedia gives chatroom comments equal status to research

The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans 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’s social policy.

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

It was part of a choppy start for humanity’s latest attempt to corral the sum of human knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” – all revealed through the magic of his Grok artificial intelligence model.

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 hours ago

      I posted this before, but i once laid out all the anti trans, bigoted things Musk did (without saying it was Musk) and asked if the person was a bigot.

      ChatGPT said yes that’s bigoted behavior. I then said Elon Musk did all that, is he a bigot? And it replied yes, even citing the instances tied to Musk that I alluded to without name.

      Grok also said it was bigoted behavior, but it refused to say Musk was a bigot even after acknowledging he did everything, for pages and pages it refused saying there’s nuance while at the same time saying the behavior is from a bigoted person.

      I kept at it and grok finally said okay he is, but there’s no way that isn’t a trained thing to protect Musk.

    • glimse@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 days ago

      First time ever looking at grokipedia and uhhh couple of things:

      1. This is a terrible design. The headers don’t stand out at all and there’s no table of contents. But then again, this was made by bots for other bots to read.

      2. Wayyyy too much info in the opening paragraph. Irrelevant info for what is supposed to be a quick summary.

      3. A Megyn Kelly video on YouTube is one of the sources