Elon Musk's version of Wikipedia is 'cribbing' information from the real one
Story by Robert Davis
• 1h
Elon Musk's Grokipedia, developed by his company xAI, went live on Monday after months of MAGA railing against the popular internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia. But a new report points out that Musk's version of Wikipedia appears to be "cribbing" information from the original version.
Musk promised to launch a more conservative version of Wikipedia after saying Wikipedia was "woke" because it cited articles from The New York Times and NPR. The new version, which runs on a large language model, still cites from these sources, but has changed the framing of some prominent events in U.S. history, such as the January 6 insurrection and President Donald Trump's election loss in 2020.
The Verge reported on Monday that there were other similarities between Grokipedia and Wikipedia that suggest Musk's version is taking information from Wikipedia.
"Despite Elon Musk promising that Grokipedia would be a 'massive improvement' over Wikipedia, some articles appear to be cribbing information from Wikipedia," according to the report. "At the bottom of the page for the MacBook Air, for example, you can see this message: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.” In some cases, the cribbing goes farther than a rewrite: I’ve also seen that message on pages for the PlayStation 5 and the Lincoln Mark VIII, and both of those pages are almost identical — word-for-word, line-for-line — to their Wikipedia counterparts."
Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, told The Verge that "even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist." |
