Elon Musk’s Grokipedia encyclopedia mission raises belief and accuracy considerations

What happened: So Elon Musk’s new AI-powered encyclopedia Grokipedia is already in serious crisis.

• A new study just came out from researchers at Cornell Tech, and it’s pretty damning. They say the platform is full of references to highly unreliable and biased sources.
• Grokipedia was launched last month by Musk’s AI company xAI. It was intended to be a new rival to Wikipedia – which Musk and others often accuse of having a liberal bias.
• But here’s the kicker: The Cornell study found that Grokipedia not only copies much of its text directly from Wikipedia, but also cites sources that Wikipedia itself has banned as utter crap.
• The most shocking example they found? Grokipedia had an entry on the “Clinton Body Count” conspiracy theory. And what source was used to support this long-debunked claim? InfoWars. Yes, the InfoWars.

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Why is this important: The whole thing shines a huge, bright light on a big problem with these new AI information tools: They don’t seem to have standards for their sources.

• According to the study, articles on Grokipedia that were not just copied from Wikipedia were 13 times more likely to cite an unreliable source and 13 times more likely to use a source that was blacklisted.
• This is a really big deal. An AI platform like this can scale and spread this kind of conspiracy-laden garbage to millions of people in a split second, all without a single human editor ever taking a look at it.

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Why should I care: Look, we’re all starting to rely on AI tools to get facts quickly. But that is the danger.

• If you ask an AI for information, you might get a lot of misleading, politically charged information that you have no idea about.
• It blurs the line between a fact and just… something the algorithm made up.
• It’s also worth noting that Musk now controls several massive information platforms – X (Twitter) and this new AI company. That means a lot of control over what people see and read.

What’s next: Musk, for his part, has already announced that he will rename Grokipedia “Encyclopedia Galactica” – calling it a “science fiction version of the Library of Alexandria.” (Yes, really).

• But as the experts point out, you can call it whatever you want. Without real accountability and a commitment to using actual, trustworthy sources, it will just be a machine that amplifies misinformation, not corrects it.
• Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation (the people behind Wikipedia) released a statement that essentially said: “See? That’s why we’re sticking with our open, community-driven model. That’s the only way we can build trust.”