Elon Musk has vigorously denied being a Nazi ever since he performed two straight-armed salutes that were widely interpreted as Sieg Heils earlier this year.
Since then, he hasn’t given critics much reason to give him the benefit of the doubt. His chatbot Grok has praised Nazis and called itself “MechaHitler.” He frequently shares racist conspiracy theories and amplifies far right accounts on his website X, formerly Twitter. He has expressed agreement with actual Nazi apologists. He publicly supported the German far right party AfD, and at one point appeared at one of its rallies, where he effectively said Germany should get over its guilt for the Holocaust. The list goes on and on.
Seriously: it never stops. Now, a new analysis of Musk’s anti-woke, AI-generated ripoff of Wikipedia, “Grokipedia,” found that it cites the infamous neo-Nazi forum Stormfront as a source of information 42 times, NBC News reports.
As it turns out, Stormfront isn’t even Grokipedia’s favorite cesspool of hate. The online encyclopedia, written by Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, also cites the white nationalist website VDARE an even more outrageous 107 times. (The site’s name, by the way, is a reference to an English settler who lived in the infamous Roanoke Colony, all the inhabitants of which mysteriously vanished, symbolizing the site’s paranoid fear that white Americans will be replaced by non-white immigrants.)
Other Grokipedia luminaries include the far-right crank hub Infowars, which is cited 34 times. No need to explain why this one’s a bad choice, too: the site’s founder, Alex Jones, was ordered to pay $1.5 billion to the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting after spreading claims that it was a hoax.
In sum, it’s all staggeringly reckless, even by Musk’s continuously plunging standards.
“The guardrails are off,” report coauthor Harold Triedman, a Cornell University computer science graduate, told NBC News. “The publicly determined, community-oriented rules that try to maintain Wikipedia as a comprehensive, reliable, human-generated source are not in application on Grokipedia.”
Full disclosure, per NBC: Triedman is a former senior privacy engineer for the Wikimedia Foundation, which maintains Wikipedia, and is a part-time contractor with one of its affiliates.
Things look even worse when you see how these white supremacists are being cited. In an article about the 1998 film “American History X,” which is about a neo-Nazi who goes to prison, Grokipedia cites and links to Stormfront six times, drawing on its users’ views on the movie. And in an article about the now-disbanded neo-Nazi group called National Vanguard, Grokipedia links to Stormfront seven times. It’s also rife with euphemisms like “advancement of peoples of European descent,” instead of using terms like “white nationalist.”
For the record, Wikipedia doesn’t allow citing these websites at all, not even as primary source for detailing these extremists views. Instead, to uphold its stance of neutrality, it relies only on second-hand sources and existing scholarships. Grokipedia, meanwhile, is simply “fact-checked by Grok” and edited by a team at xAI whose operations remain opaque to the public.
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