this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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Elon Musk Had Grok Rewrite Wikipedia. It Calls Hitler “The Führer.” (theintercept.com)
submitted 1 week ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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In late October, Elon Musk released a Wikipedia alternative, with pages written by his AI chatbot Grok. Unlike its nearly quarter-century-old namesake, Musk said 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 Führer of Germany from 1933 to 1945.” 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 “Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934 until his suicide in 1945.” NBC News also pointed out that the page on Hitler goes on for some 13,000 words before the first mention of the Holocaust.

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[–] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

so you're judging their costs and balances based on ten year old data? and acting like times haven't changed enormously in that decade?

I know the amount of bandwidth AI's are using to scrape wikipedia is itself an onus:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/04/ai-bots-strain-wikimedia-as-bandwidth-surges-50/

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/wikipedia-contributors-are-worried-about-ai-scraping.html

https://thecoremachine.com/technology/wikipedia-vs-ai-traffic-holding-steady-but-scrapers-are-draining-its-resources/

[–] softwarist@programming.dev 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Here is their FY 24–25 Audit Report. To wit, their net assets were $296.6 million, while their total internet hosting expenses were $3.5 million. So the claim that hosting expenses make up a trivial fraction of their total assets would appear to hold true even moreso today than a decade ago.

Granted, the FAQs for the report state that "The vast majority of […] revenue came from donations […], as well as investment income, Wikimedia Enterprise revenue, and other revenue primarily related to a cost sharing agreement with the Wikimedia Endowment".

I remain suspicious of the large increases in "Salaries and wages" year-over-year compared to other expense categories.

[–] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

cool, you do you. don't donate and continue to use it like a parasite lol

[–] softwarist@programming.dev 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I prefer the term "commensalist"

[–] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

commensalist

sure thing parasite. no, actually you're worse than a parasite, you're actively discouraging people from doing the right thing.

you're an asshole lol

[–] softwarist@programming.dev 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think I can live with that