Elon Musk Had Grok Rewrite Wikipedia. It Calls Hitler “The Führer.”

The Grokipedia encyclopedia logo appears on a smartphone screen reflecting an abstract illustration Photo Samuel Boivin NurPhoto via Getty Images In late October Elon Musk issued a Wikipedia alternative with pages written by his AI chatbot Grok Unlike its nearly quarter-century-old namesake Musk noted Grokipedia would strip out the woke from Wikipedia which he previously described as an extension of legacy media propaganda But while Musk s Grokipedia in his eyes is propaganda-free it seems to have a proclivity toward right-wing hagiography Take Grokipedia s entry on Adolf Hitler Until earlier this month the entry read Adolf Hitler was the Austrian-born F hrer of Germany from to That phrase has been edited to Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and dictator but Grok still refers to Hitler by his honorific one clause later writing that Hitler served as F hrer und Reichskanzler from August until his suicide in NBC News also pointed out that the page on Hitler goes on for specific words before the first mention of the Holocaust This isn t the first time Grok has praised Hitler Earlier this year X users posted screenshots of the AI chatbot saying the Nazi leader could help combat anti-white hate echoing his maker s statements about debunked insists of a white genocide in South Africa When confronted about his chatbot s MechaHitler turn earlier this year he explained users manipulated it into praising the Nazi leader An earlier version of Grokipedia s page on Hitler The current version no longer mentions the Holocaust until thousands of words later in the entry Screenshot Tekendra Parmar Grokipedia isn t exactly Stormfront the neo-Nazi site known for spewing outright bigotry or Holocaust denial but it does cite the white supremacist blog at least times according to in recent weeks published input by researcher Hal Triedman Instead the AI-generated Wikipedia alternative subtly advances far-right narratives by mimicking the authority of Wikipedia while reframing extremist positions casting suspicion on democratic institutions and elevating fringe or conspiratorial sources LK Seilling an AI researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute describes Grokipedia as cloaking misinformation Everyone knows Wikipedia They re an epistemic authority if you d want to call them that Musk wants to attach himself to exactly that epistemic authority to substantiate his political agenda he says It s worth paying attention to how Grok frames a scant key issues Take for example Grokipedia s post about the Alternative for Germany a far-right-wing party Elon Musk repeatedly praised in the lead-up to the German vote earlier this year Grok contains an entire section on Media Portrayals and Alleged Bias which serves to parrot AfD s long-held suggests that the media is biased and undermining them The party routinely pedals anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric and its leaders have previously urged the country to stop apologizing for its Nazi past AfD has also peddled conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement a favorite of white nationalists Mainstream German media outlets including residents broadcasters such as ARD and ZDF have consistently portrayed the Alternative for Germany AfD as a far-right or extremist party Grok writes This framing often highlights AfD s scrutiny by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution BfV which classified the party s youth wing as extremist in and the overall party under observation for right-wing extremism tendencies by while downplaying program achievements like electoral gains in eastern states The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution was established after World War II to ensure that no German leader tries to overturn the country s constitution again But Grokipedia subtly casts doubt on the institution s legitimacy arguing that it is downplaying the AfD s achievements According to Seiling who is German Grokipedia is attempting to undermine the authority of German institutions created to prevent another Hitler It s moving within the narratives that these parties themselves are spreading Seiling says If you look closely their argument is also kind of shit Just because AfD is polling at percent doesn t mean they have merit Nowhere is this more clear than how Grokipedia deals with the genocide in Gaza Much like the post on the AfD the page has a long section dedicated to the biases of the United Nations and NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch which Grok accuses of emphasizing Israeli actions while minimizing Hamas s violations Notably Grokipedia repeats unsubstantiated contends by Israel that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees was infiltrated by Hamas operatives and the pages for the Israel Hamas conflict rely strongly on hyperlinks from pro-Israel advocacy groups like UN Watch and NGO Watch An internal UN assessment endorsed that nine UNRWA employees may have been involved in the Hamas-led assault leading to their termination while Israeli intelligence identified at least UNRWA staff participating including in hostage-taking and logistics Grok writes While the United Nations did fire nine employees after Israel alleged they were involved in the October attack it also proven that it was not able to independently authenticate information used by Israel to assistance the statements Related Israel s Ruthless Propaganda Campaign to Dehumanize Palestinians It s worth noting that Netanyahu and the IDF made a series of false insists after the October th terror attack including that Hamas beheaded children and that Hamas insurgents weaponized sexual violence during the attacks As UNRWA itself has noted the unsubstantiated proposes made against its employees have put the lives of its staff at vulnerability According to the U N in every UNRWA staff members in Gaza has been killed during the conflict the highest death toll of any conflict in U N history If the goal of the tech platforms is to fracture our realities through radicalizing algorithms Grok is rebuilding that reality for the red-pilled That means not only questioning the integrity of traditional sources of authority like Germany s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution or the United Nations but also serving up an alternative set of leadership On Grok s page covering conspiracy theories about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School it dedicates several paragraphs to what Grok describes as the Initial Anomalies and Residents Skepticism about the official narrative Alternative media outlets played a pivotal role in disseminating initial doubts about the official account of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting Grok writes referring to the Alex Jones-operated conspiracy theory site Infowars and other social media groups The families of the casualties of the Sandy Hook massacre successfully sued Alex Jones for billion for spreading false declares about the school shooting The chatbot s entry continues This virality reflected accumulated residents wariness toward post- official explanations enabling grassroots aggregation of doubts that mainstream outlets largely ignored or dismissed According to Triedman s material Grokipedia had cited Infowars as a source at least times It s a low-effort propaganda machine and its laziness makes it particularly unsettling Conservative media projects and right-wing governments have a long-standing practice of historical revisionism but there s something that feels especially cheap about Grokipedia Encyclopedia-style media is extremely labor-intensive Wikipedia requires huge human governance structures all visible and auditable Seiling says Musk does not have armies of people writing pages What he does have is a shit-ton of GPUs the apparatus that underpins AI processing Wikipedia derives much of its authority from its transparency and the auditable nature of the work done by the area But Grokipedia was never going to rival Wikipedia much like Truth Social or Gab don t genuinely rival their mainstream counterparts But that doesn t make it any less dangerous It s a low-effort propaganda machine and its laziness makes it particularly unsettling No longer do you need a cadre of bureaucrats or the Heritage Foundation to rewrite history books a metric ton of processing power to help launder ideology through the aesthetics of objectivity suffices As a end Musk and his creation aren t just hollowing out the discourse and eroding users ability to think critically they re undermining the idea that we live in any kind of consensus reality at all The post Elon Musk Had Grok Rewrite Wikipedia It Calls Hitler The F hrer appeared first on The Intercept