On Monday, Elon Musk’s xAI startup launched Grokipedia, which the billionaire is pitching as an AI-generated different to the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Musk first introduced the venture in late September on his social media platform X, saying it might be “a large enchancment over Wikipedia,” and “a vital step in direction of the xAI objective of understanding the Universe.”
Musk mentioned final week that he had delayed the launch of Grokipedia as a result of his workforce wanted “to do extra work to purge out the propaganda.” When Grokipedia finally dropped on Monday, WIRED was initially unable to entry the web site and obtained an automatic message that it was blocked.
Once we lastly bought entry to it, WIRED discovered that the net encyclopedia contained prolonged entries generated by AI. Whereas lots of the pages WIRED noticed on launch day appeared pretty much like Wikipedia by way of tone and content material, numerous notable Grokipedia entries denounced the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and typically perpetuated historic inaccuracies.
The Grokipedia entry in regards to the slavery of African Individuals within the US features a part outlining quite a few “ideological justifications” made for slavery, together with the “Shift from Obligatory Evil to Constructive Good.” The top of the entry focuses on criticisms of The 1619 Undertaking, which it says incorrectly framed “slavery because the central engine of the nation’s political, financial, and cultural improvement.”
Entries for more moderen historic occasions put conservative views on the middle. When WIRED looked for “homosexual marriage” in Grokipedia, no entry popped up, however one of many on-screen solutions was for “homosexual pornography” as a substitute. This entry in Grokipedia falsely states that the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic within the Nineteen Eighties.
“This marked the onset of what would grow to be a devastating disaster disproportionately affecting homosexual male communities, the place behaviors idealized in pornography—reminiscent of unprotected receptive anal intercourse and a number of nameless companions—aligned instantly with major transmission routes, resulting in fast seroconversion charges,” the Grokipedia entry claims.
xAI didn’t instantly return a request for remark.
The Grokipedia entry for “transgender” contains two mentions of “transgenderism,” a time period generally used to denigrate trans people. The entry additionally refers to trans ladies as “organic males” who’ve “generated important conflicts, primarily centered on dangers to ladies’s security, privateness, and sex-based protections established to mitigate male-perpetrated violence.” The opening part highlights social media as a possible “contagion” that’s rising the variety of trans individuals.
