New Delhi: Elon Musk’s Grokipedia, which carries thousands of citations to questionable and problematic sources, US researchers stated on Friday, by raising doubts about the reliability of the AI-powered encyclopedia as an information tool. Elon Musk’s company xAI launched the Grokipedia last month to compete with the most popular Wikipedia, a crowdsourced information repository authored by humans that the billionaire and others on the American right have repeatedly accused of ideological bias. It is clear that the sourcing guardrails have largely been lifted on Grokipedia. This results in the inclusion of questionable sources and an overall higher prevalence of potentially problematic sources.
The study found that the scraped hundreds of thousands of Grokipedia articles stated the trend was particularly notable in the topics pertaining to elected officials and the controversial political issues. Grokipedia’s entry for Clinton body count, a widely debunked conspiracy theory that links the deaths of multiple people to former US President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, cites InfoWars, a far-right website notorious for peddling misinformation. Grokipedia articles cite American and Indian right-wing media outlets, Chinese and Iranian state media, anti-immigration, antisemitic or anti-Muslim sites, and portals accused of promoting pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Grokipedia cites these sources without qualifying their reliability. Grokipedia articles often contain exactly identical copies of text from the Wikipedia site it has intended to outshine.
Grokipedia articles, which are not attributed to Wikipedia, are 3.2 times more likely than those on the rival platform to cite sources deemed generally unreliable by the English Wikipedia community. They are also 13 times more likely to include a blocked source, which is blocked by Wikipedia. AFP’s request to xAI for comment generated this auto response Legacy media lies. Elon Musk and the US Republican Party have frequently accused Wikipedia of being biased against right-wing ideas. Last Year, Elon Musk urged his more than 200 million followers on X to stop donating to Wikipedia, dubbing the site Wikipedia.
