Grokipedia goes off the rails (again)

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Elon Musk’s shiny new Wikipedia rival hasn’t even blown out its first-month birthday candle, and it’s already in a full-blown credibility crisis. 

Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched by Musk’s xAI, was supposed to be the bold, bias-free antidote to Wikipedia. 

Instead, a new Cornell Tech study says it’s more like Wikipedia’s chaotic evil twin: part copy-paste machine, part conspiracy megaphone, part “are you kidding me?” (Via: Digital Trends)

Researchers found that Grokipedia is stuffed with citations from wildly unreliable sources, some so bad that Wikipedia banned them years ago. 

And in the most eyebrow-raising example, Grokipedia’s entry for the long-debunked “Clinton body count” conspiracy cited InfoWars. 

Yes, the same InfoWars known for turning frogs and Alex Jones into cultural punchlines. This is, apparently, Grokipedia’s idea of scholarship.

It gets worse. The study reports that Grokipedia articles not lifted from Wikipedia were three times more likely to cite unreliable sources and thirteen times more likely to cite blacklisted ones. 

In internet years, that’s like discovering your brand-new smoke detector was built entirely out of matches.

Why is this such a big deal? Because AI-powered info tools don’t just get things wrong, they get things wrong at scale. 

No human editors, no community review, just an endlessly replicating fountain of faux facts presented with confident robot certainty. 

Ask Grokipedia a question, and you might get a conspiracy theory with citations that look official but were scraped from the digital gutter.

And it’s all happening under the roof of someone who now controls both X (Twitter) and a rapidly expanding AI empire. 

When one person controls multiple information firehoses, the stakes aren’t small. “Oops, we accidentally amplified baseless political conspiracies” stops being a punchline.

Musk’s response? A rebrand. Grokipedia will now be called Encyclopedia Galactica, which Musk describes as a “sci-fi version of the Library of Alexandria.” 

Cute name, but researchers say renaming the problem won’t fix its foundation.

Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation all but winked at the chaos, reminding the world that its messy, human-run model is exactly what keeps misinformation at bay. 

A machine alone can’t build trust, especially one that thinks InfoWars is a source worth quoting.