Grokipedia: Musk Aims to Command Universal Knowledge

The old saying goes that he who pays gives the orders, and since tech magnate Elon Musk has millions to spare, he has now also created an encyclopedia attempting to be the one who decides what is known and what is not on this planet.

It is from his own worldview and generated by Grok, his proprietary AI, that Grokipedia was born—an encyclopedia project put online in beta version 0.1 since last October 27th.

Musk's own AI presents this new option "as an alternative to Wikipedia. Its main goal is to create an open, broader, deeper, and more accurate knowledge repository, based on the Grok language model."

It adds that "when it reaches a sufficient level—there is still a long way to go, it says literally—it will be renamed Galactic Encyclopedia, inspired by the science fiction of Isaac Asimov. It will be an open-source distillation of all human knowledge."

It seems AIs know nothing of modesty or at least moderation, but this "0.1" version of Grokipedia only contains 885,000 articles, in contrast to Wikipedia, which has over 8 million entries. Not for nothing did Musk post a tweet on X urging, almost demanding: "No more donations to Wikipedia until they start being truthful!"

From the pioneering encyclopedia of the Enlightenment to that first multimedia encyclopedia Encarta, launched in 1993 by Microsoft under Bill Gates, and which Cubans carried on CDs in portfolios and briefcases, examples abound of how much has been attempted to bias and manipulate knowledge by omitting data, distorting realities...

Musk has been increasingly amplifying his media power since buying Twitter, now X, in 2022, always from the principle of not being truthful, but viral; and what can be expected from this new offering, whose supposed altruism is merely bait for the naive.

The owner of Tesla and Starlink does not hide his inclination towards the far right; rather, he flaunts it unrestrainedly, especially on Twitter, which he has turned into his political platform and from where he supported at full volume the assault on the U.S. Capitol, qualifying it as a display of citizen freedom.

Therefore, when his encyclopedia stops crawling, it will be interesting to take its pulse to investigate whether the conceptions that distinguish him will become the compass of Grokipedia, including the conspiracy theory of the "Great Replacement," with which he seems to identify, particularly stemming from his near phobia of migrants.

Because also since The Encyclopédie (1751-1772) by Diderot and D'Alembert, which marked the era of great encyclopedias as a symbol of the Enlightenment, it has been known that these monumental works are in themselves also an ideological declaration and respond to the political affiliation and worldview of their authors and financiers. One only needs to consult certain terms or names on Wikipedia, for example, to confirm this.

Paradoxically, Wikipedia's own creator, Jimmy Wales, even before Musk's encyclopedia went online, stated in an interview with The Washington Post that he did not have high expectations for Grokipedia's outcome because AI language models "just aren't good enough to write encyclopedia articles. There will be a lot of errors," he asserted.

Furthermore, internet users abound who complain about Grok's errors or inaccuracies. What can then be expected from this Grokipedia which, when asked about "Cuban Revolution," offers 5,499 results: from Museum of the Revolution (Cuba); Cuba; Trinidad, Cuba; prostitution in Cuba; Miss Cuba... and a broad etcetera that even includes the charanga band, but says nothing about what happened in Cuba on January 1st, 1959.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque / CubaSí Translation Staff