In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia
The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving, studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck’s social policy.That was some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched last week by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.The problem was, as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these facts were false.It was part of a choppy start for humanity’s latest attempt to corral the sum of human knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” – all revealed through the magic of his Grok artificial intelligence model.When the multibillionaire switched on Grokipedia on Tuesday, he said it was “better than Wikipedia”, or “Wokepedia” as his supporters call it, reflecting a view that the dominant online encyclopedia often reflects leftwing talking points.
One post on X caught the triumphant mood among Musk’s fans: “Elon just killed Wikipedia.Good riddance.”But users found Grokipedia lifted large chunks from the website it intended to usurp, contained numerous factual errors and seemed to promote Musk’s favoured rightwing talking points.In between posts on X promoting his creation, Musk this week declared “civil war in Britain is inevitable”, called for the English “to ally with the hard men” such as the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and said only the far-right AfD party could “save Germany”.Musk was so enamoured of his AI-encyclopedia he said he planned to one day etch the “comprehensive collection of all knowledge” into a stable oxide and “place copies … in orbit, the moon and Mars to preserve it for the future”.
Evans, however, was discovering that Musk’s use of AI to weigh and check facts was suffering a more earth-bound problem.“Chatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,” Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, told the Guardian, after being invited to test out Grokipedia.“AI just hoovers up everything.”He noted its entry for Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and wartime munitions minister, repeated lies and distortions spread by Speer even though they had been corrected in a 2017 award-winning biography.The site’s entry on the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose biography Evans wrote, claimed wrongly he experienced German hyperinflation in 1923, that he was an officer in the Royal Corps of Signals and didn’t mention that he had been married twice, Evans said.
The problem, said David Larsson Heidenblad, the deputy director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge in Sweden, was a clash of knowledge cultures,“We live in a moment where there is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is more trustworthy than human-to-human insight,” Heidenblad said,“The Silicon Valley mindset is very different from the traditional scholarly approach,Its knowledge culture is very iterative where making mistakes is a feature, not a bug,By contrast, the academic world is about building trust over time and scholarship over long periods during which the illusion that you know everything cracks.
Those are real knowledge processes.”Grokipedia’s arrival continues a centuries-old encyclopedia tradition from the 15th-century Chinese Yongle scrolls to the Encyclopédie, an engine for spreading controversial enlightenment views in 18th-century France.These were followed by the anglophone-centric Encyclopedia Britannica and, since 2001, the crowd-sourced Wikipedia.But Grokipedia is the first to be largely created by AI and this week a question swirled: who controls the truth when AIs, steered by powerful individuals, are holding the pen?“If it’s Musk doing it then I am afraid of political manipulation,” said the cultural historian Peter Burke, emeritus professor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who in 2000 wrote A Social History of Knowledge since the time of Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century printing press.“I am sure some of it will be overt to some readers, but the problem may be that other readers may miss it,” Burke said.
The anonymity of many encyclopedia entries often gave them “an air of authority it shouldn’t have”, he added.Andrew Dudfield, the head of AI at Full Fact, a UK-based factchecking organisation, said: “We really have to consider whether an AI-generated encyclopedia – a facsimile of reality, run through a filter – is a better proposition than any of the previous things that we have.It doesn’t display the same transparency but it is asking for the same trust.It is not clear how far the human hand is involved, how far it is AI=generated and what content the AI was trained on.It is hard to place trust in something when you can’t see how those choices are made.
”Sign up to TechScapeA weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our livesafter newsletter promotionMusk had been encouraged to launch Grokipedia by, among others, Donald Trump’s tech adviser, David Sacks, who complained Wikipedia was “hopelessly biased” and maintained by “an army of leftwing activists”.Until as recently as 2021, Musk has supported Wikipedia, tweeting on its 20th birthday: “So glad you exist.” But by October 2023 his antipathy towards the platform led him to offer £1bn “if they change their name to Dickipedia”.Yet many of the 885,279 articles available on Grokipedia in its first week were lifted almost word for word from Wikipedia, including its entries on the PlayStation 5, the Ford Focus and Led Zeppelin.Others, however, differed significantly:Grokipedia’s entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine cited the Kremlin as a prominent source and quoted the official Russian terminology about “denazifying” Ukraine, protecting ethnic Russians and neutralising threats to Russian security.
By contrast, Wikipedia said Putin espoused imperialist views and “baselessly claimed that the Ukrainian government were neo-Nazis”.Grokipedia called the far-right organisation Britain First a “patriotic political party”, which pleased its leader, Paul Golding, who in 2018 was jailed for anti-Muslim hate crimes.Wikipedia, on the other hand, called it “neo-fascist” and a “hate group”.Grokipedia called the 6 January 2021 turmoil at the US Capitol in Washington DC a “riot”, not an attempted coup, and said there were “empirical underpinnings” to the idea that a deliberate demographic erasure of white people in western nations is being orchestrated through mass immigration.This is a notion that critics consider to be a conspiracy theory.
Grokipedia said Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case was handed down “after a trial in a heavily Democratic jurisdiction”, and there was no mention of his conflicts of interest – for example receiving a jet from Qatar or the Trump family cryptocurrency businesses.Wikipedia responded coolly to the launch of Grokipedia, saying it was still trying to understand how Grokipedia worked.“Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear,” a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation said.“It has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement.Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.
”xAI did not respond to requests for comment,
Crispy chicken and pancetta with a nutty apple salad: Thomasina Miers’ Sunday best recipes
I recently invested in a beautifully wide, Shropshire-made pan that works on the hob and in the oven with equal ease, and without the chemical nonstick lining I keep reading about. It is a brilliant pan. As I turn on the heat to crisp the skin on my chicken thighs on the stove top, I can prep the vegetables I will then roast in the same pan. There is a soothing rhythm to this type of cooking, where most of the work is done in the oven. Here, I use jerusalem artichokes, the most delicious of autumn vegetables, parboiled in lemon juice to make them more digestible and then roasted with garlic and onions, until beautifully caramelised, and it’s a marvellous thing to put down on the kitchen table
From fritters to pizza, there’s more to pumpkin season than soups and carving
G’day! The last time I wrote to you was in the midst of our Australian winter, as the wind tippity-tapped tree-branch morse code on the windows and I tried to summon spring with the might of several tins of summer tomatoes and some inspiration from the Feast recipe archives.Well, allegedly, our spring has sprung, though you wouldn’t be able to tell, seeing as one of the challenges – or joys – of living in Melbourne is that this city’s concept of “seasons” is a little more fluid than most. Blustery winds have kept the trees dancing, wreaking havoc on the darling buds of May – sorry, October – and sending enthusiastically woven “cobwebs” and other Halloween paraphernalia flying.But I can guess which vegetable is going to be on your supermarket shelf, no matter which side of the international date line you are on: pumpkin! This is the time of year when European eaters are reaching for pumpkins to make soups and curries, while many across the Atlantic are mostly just carving them up. So, how to find more things to do with pumpkin than souping or sculpting? It helps to remember that pumpkin is also known as winter squash – and what’s summer squash? Courgettes or, as I say, zucchini
Benjamina Ebuehi’s recipe for ginger biscuit s’mores | The sweet spot
What’s Bonfire Night without some toasty, gooey marshmallows? And it’s only right to have them in a s’more, the American classic that’s also now part of the festivities over on this side of the pond. Digestive biscuits are typically the go-to, but I like to add extra flavour, depth and texture by using ginger oaty biscuits instead. These are quick to put together and don’t require any chilling. Ideally, the s’mores would be made over a real fire, but a blowtorch or hot grill will do the job, too.Prep 5 min Cook 30 min Makes 9100g unsalted butter 25g honey 130g plain flour 120g caster sugar 45g oats 2 tsp ground ginger ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda ½ tsp salt 9 squares dark chocolate 9 marshmallows Flaky sea saltHeat the oven to 190C (170C fan)/375F/gas 5 and line two oven trays with baking paper
How to turn pastry scraps into a quick and tasty caramelised onion tart – recipe | Waste not
This is my quick version of pissaladière, and it transforms a small amount of leftover pastry scraps into a spontaneous treat. Keep and combine any trimmings into a ball and re-roll as and when required. Pastry keeps well in the freezer, and by skipping two time-consuming steps in the traditional recipe – that is, making the pastry and caramelising the onions – this one comes together about an hour faster. Instead, the onions are cooked upside down, steaming and caramelising beneath a blanket of pastry with anchovies and black olives for a fast, fun twist on a French classic. And if you have less pastry, you can always halve the recipe
Australian supermarket chocolate ice-cream taste test: ‘My scorecard read simply: “I’m going to buy it”’
Sweet memory lane or boulevard of broken creams? Nicholas Jordan and friends sample 23 tubs in search of nostalgia, glee and chocolate excessIf you value our independent journalism, we hope you’ll consider supporting us todayGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailI grew up in a house barren of treats – there was no regular supply of chocolate, snakes, sour lollies or caramels. There was one exception: ice-cream, and I was mostly free to eat it whenever I wanted. That constant, childhood joy was the start of a storied love affair. Later, when I had money to buy my lunch in high school, I would get a one-litre tub, a pair of spoons, and my friend and I would eat the entire thing and nothing else. Sometimes, if we were particularly greedy, we’d split a two-litre tub
Sweet dreams? Healthy ways to put pudding back on the menu | Kitchen aide
I eat healthily, but my meals are never really complete without pudding. Yoghurt and stewed fruit aside, do you have any suggestions for what will hit the spot without verging too far into the unhealthy? Wendy, by emailThe truth is, you can’t often have your cake and eat it – or not a big piece, anyway. “My main piece of advice, which maybe isn’t all that welcome, is to keep to small portions,” says Brian Levy, author of Good & Sweet, in which his recipes contain no added sugar. “My grandma would keep mini chocolate bars and have just one, but that’s never really worked for me.”’Tis the season for stewed fruit, but have you tried Melissa Hemsley’s banana slices sandwiched together with peanut butter, half-dipped in melted chocolate and put in the freezer? (FYI the same tactic also works like a dream with dates
Walking 3,000 or more steps a day may slow progression of Alzheimer’s, study says
UK’s unregulated pregnancy scan clinics putting lives in danger, say experts
NHS hospitals to test AI tool that helps diagnose and treat prostate cancer
Why we must tackle the crisis in end-of-life care | Letters
Why Reeves should gamble on tax hikes | Brief letters
A fatal drop: what do we know about the drugs, 500 times stronger than heroin, taking Australian lives?