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…
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