Renée DiResta writes:

Late last month, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia with 855,279 articles, no human editors, and no way for users to request improvements beyond a suggestion box addressed to its eponymous chatbot author. The tech entrepreneur is eager, he has said, to “purge out the propaganda” that he argues afflicts Wikipedia, the venerable user-generated reference source. But some Grokipedia articles are near replicas of Wikipedia entries. Other articles in the new source seem conspicuously sanitized: The article about the U.S. government’s now-defunct foreign-aid agency fails to mention Musk, who boasted about his role in “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

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.

This is why Republicans in Congress have recently begun sending letters that accuse the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the encyclopedia, of ideological bias and demand the names of certain volunteer arbitrators who help address factual disagreements. It’s also why some of the most powerful people in the world are demanding “reforms” to Wikipedia—or launching their own copycats. [Continue reading…]