Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.PHOTOGRAPH: ANDREW HARNIK; GETTY IMAGES
Elon Musk's new initiative, GrokPedia, has billed itself as a more "neutral" Wikipedia. But does it come close to being objective? Hardly. Musk's AI-powered encyclopedia was launched by xAI, and aims to displace the nonprofit Wikipedia, which has been running for over 20 years with the help of volunteers as an encyclopedia composed of entries written and edited by volunteers, by simply having its built-in chatbot, Grok, draft the entries. While Musk himself claims that GrokPedia will get rid of "woke" biases that he believes are rife in mainstream media and encyclopedias, this platform is already showing clear political leaning.
While claiming neutrality, GrokPedia leans pretty far to the right, in no small part due to the ideological position of its disabled inventor. Musk has long attacked Wikipedia for its perceived left ideological leaning, but GrokPedia's model of "objectivity" has not escaped bias: rather, it's just a different kind of biased. According to a study from Columbia University, AI models will often reflect the cultural values of the data that they were trained, and Grok is no exception. At this point in its development, GrokPedia is trapped in the ideological gravity well of its creator.
What is even more concerning is that GrokPedia is duplicating, and repackaging, much of the content already contained in Wikipedia, but with a decidedly conservative spin. If this is the future of information curated by one man with a blatant agenda, it is surely not the neutral, objective source Musk promised.
This post has been shared on Reddit by @davideownzall through the HivePosh initiative.