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Elon Musk launches encyclopedia ‘fact-checked’ by AI and aligning with rightwing views
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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Sounds like he told Grok to "rephrase" Wikipedia, then tells it to edit random shit so that it agrees with his views.
I'd bet if you looked up a random neutral topic, there'd be a clear case for plagiarism straight from Wikipedia.
You would be correct. Random page, almost completely identical:
Call of Duty 3 (Wikipedia) Call of Duty 3 (Grokipedia)
Each section has 1-3 words changed, that's it.
So basically, Elon forked Wikipedia and edited the pages that didn't align with the conservative worldview.
Do the word changes line up to an older version of wikipedia. It might be possible to identify who downloaded the copy and block the IP, lol.
IIRC, Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA licensed, generally it’s okay to take, remix, and publish its content, no matter whether you’re using it for good or evil. You just have to Share Alike the results.
But asking a known biased bullshit generator to fact check things is pretty cringe in general.
I wonder if its a one-time fork, or if Musk wants to continue to derive benefit from Wikipedia authors and editors. Is it possible its actually a real-time AI filtering each request? If so that would burn up a massive amount of AI tokens.
It would also present some great methods to tease out exactly how his filters are working. Assuming its real-time, a single wikipedia page could be created with test content with specific words or phrases then a check on the grok version to see if it alters it. A full map could be built of exactly the rules its using.
It can't be a one time fork. Whenever his propaganda changes, he's going to want to give different instructions to his AI and then regenerate the entire encyclopedia like he already did.
It's a different use case from an encyclopedia that is based on facts and the truth.
Its a shame there is no license that forbids AI use. Well, there kind of are but none are common and probably wouldn't hold up in court. Still, it would be nice to attach to work and communicate that the preference is to not have AI reuse
AI is predominantly classified as “fair use” in the US right now, so it wouldn’t even matter if you said “No AI” - copyright does not apply.
That's what I meant by "wouldn't hold up in court". Thanks for filling in the specifics. I wish it wasn't classified as fair us, I think its an unfortunate way to avoid paying people for training data and that's hiding the true cost of the system
You must have misread, grok is doing the fact checking not Elon.
You must have misread, I'm not writing a book, my pen is
I don't get the joke? Mine would make the most sense reading the post I'm responding to and then immediately reading mine.
Grok and Elon are the same thing
O...Kay? I mean that aligns with my joke but it's a bit less funny if you explain it
Do people have quotations about some funky and biased stuff his Wikipedia competitor says? I wanna check it out but am at work
Oh man, a fully AI edited Wikipedia? This is going to be an unmitigated disaster.
And that's before the Nazi stuff happens with this.
But he thought about it for at least a month! Must be a good idea! (/s)
The far right has always hated wikipedia.
Lemmy even had some weird account who spam posted about how terrible Wikipedia was for a while. Not sure if they stopped or if I just blocked them at some point.
Yeah, for some weird reason, a lot of wingnuts just hated Wikipedia from day one. Not sure how it was orchestrated so fast. Some of the ones pretending to be "independents" were claiming that Wikipedia just could not work, since "anyone can edit it".
But some of the biggest complainers were the kind of babies that think all of the culture has been orchestrated in opposition to their feelings that they hold as "facts". Meaning, if other people don't just accept their worldview as the default centered and correct one, they lose their shit.
We have probably all met people that think their take on "the" bible is not only correct, but self-evident and provable, etc...and naturally, any bullshit morality they want to spin out of that should be just accepted as a "fact", etc...they then proceed to just make up how policy should work in the United States, because first they use bad logic to center their superstitions, just lie outright about how the United States is supposedly a xtian country, etc...and so they spend endless rage spinning on even the dating conventions because their character of Jesus is not put at the center of everything. When they run across something like Wikipedia that isn't as cloistered, it drives them crazy. See also: things like PBS, NPR, universities in general, educated people, and so on...