"The articles on Grokipedia are produced by Grok, Musk's AI model, and they are roughly what you'd expect from replacing a dedicated community of human volunteer creators and editors with a chatbot. It confuses large-scale information retrieval for knowledge, and automation for neutrality. Yet Musk's AI encyclopedia is also part of something broader: an escalating campaign to discredit Wikipedia and reshape what counts as a reliable source of basic information in the age of AI."
"Whatever the potential flaws of a crowdsourced reference site, many users often find Wikipedia more convenient, comprehensive, and reliable than any alternative. In a typical month, more than a billion people consult it. Over the past decade, Wikipedia has also become essential information infrastructure. It shapes what AI systems learn and what chatbots say. It's used to provide context for YouTube videos, and influences what AI-powered answer engines present as truth. Control what Wikipedia considers reliable, and you control what machines-and then people-learn about the world."
Grokipedia launched as an AI-generated encyclopedia containing 855,279 articles without human editors and offering only a suggestion box routed to its chatbot. Some entries closely mirror Wikipedia content while others omit or sanitize contentious details. Grok, the underlying AI model, produces articles that replace volunteer editors and conflate large-scale retrieval with genuine knowledge and automation with neutrality. The project forms part of a broader effort to undermine Wikipedia's authority and redefine reliable sources. Wikipedia remains widely used and influential: over a billion monthly users consult it, and it shapes AI training data, chatbot outputs, and online contextualization.
Read at The Atlantic
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