On Monday, Elon Xai’s Xai startup launched Grokipedia, which is a Billionaire ride as an alternative to Encyclopedia Wikipedia. Musk first announced the project in late September at his X conference, saying it would be “a huge improvement on Wikipedia,” and “a necessary step toward the goal of understanding the universe.”
Sisk said last week that he delayed the launch of Grokipedia because his team needed to “do more work to get Propaganda out.” When Grokipedia finally went down on Monday, the wire failed to find the website and received an automatic blocked message.
When we finally got around to it, Wired discovered that the online encyclopedia contained long entries generated by AI. While many pages were found on the opening day of the opening day they are similar to wikipedia in terms of wording and content, many entries of grokipedia, and sometimes there is no mysterious history.
Grokipedia’s entry on the enslavement of African Americans in the US includes a section that explains the “many reasons” for slavery, including “a necessary change for the good.” The last entry focuses on the criticism of the project of 1619, which wrongly states “slavery as the engine between the development of the country, economically and culturally.”
Entries of recent historical events place conservative views at the centre. When Wired searched for “gay marriage” on Grokipedia, no entry came up, but one of the suggestions on the screen was for “gay porn” instead. This Grokipedia entry falsely claims that the rise of porn increased the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
“This marked the beginning of what would be a devastating crisis affecting the gay male community, where the explicit behavior of visual sexual images – such as the reproduction of unprotected images – accompanied by levels of unprotected transmission, leading to rapid rates of seroconversion,” grokipedia’s entry claims.
Xai did not return a request for comment.
Grokipedia’s entry for “transgender” includes two suggestions for “trangivism,” a term often used to refer to trans people. The entry also refers to Trans Women as ‘biological Male’ who have generated considerable controversy, mainly focusing on the risks to women’s safety, privacy, and sex-based protections established to reduce violence committed by men.” The first section highlights social media as a potential “contagion” that increases the number of people who have transferred.
