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Monday, Elon of musk xAI Startup launched Grokipedia, which the billionaire is pitching as an AI-generated alternative Crowdsourced Encyclopedia Wikipedia. Musk first announced the project in late September on his social media platform X, saying it would be “a massive improvement over Wikipedia” and “a necessary step toward xAI’s goal of understanding the universe.”
Musk said last week that he delayed the launch of Grokipedia because his team “needs to do more work to free up advertising.” When Grokipedia was finally taken down on Monday, WIRED was initially unable to access the website and received an automated message saying it had been blocked.
When we finally got access to it, Wired found that the online encyclopedia had long entries generated by AI. While many of the pages Wired viewed on launch day were fairly similar to Wikipedia in tone and content, several notable Grokipedia entries criticized the mainstream media, highlighted conservative views, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.
The Grokipedia entry on the enslavement of African Americans in the United States has a section that outlines many.ideological justificationMade for slavery, including “the shift from necessary evil to positive good”. The end of the entry focuses on criticism of the 1619 Project, which erroneously “framed slavery as the central engine of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural development.”
Entries center conservative views on recent historical events. When WIRED searched Grokipedia for “Gay Marriage,” no entries were found, but one of the on-screen suggestions was “gay pornography” instead. This Grokipedia entry falsely states that the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
“This marked the beginning of a devastating crisis that disproportionately affects the gay male community, where behaviors idealized in pornography — such as unprotected receptive anal intercourse and multiple anonymous partners — are directly linked to the primary transmission route, resulting in rapid seroconversion rates,” Grossant Claripedia.
xAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Grokipedia entry for “transgender” contains two references to “transgenderism”, a term commonly used Insulting trans people. The entry also refers to trans women as “biological men” who have “created significant conflicts, primarily around women’s safety, privacy, and risk to sex-based protections established to mitigate male-perpetrated violence.” The opening section highlights social media as a potential “contagion” that is increasing the number of trans people.
