Wikipedia co-founder reacts to Musk’s Grokipedia announcement

Elon Musk announced he's creating Grokipedia, a competitor to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia

The big difference is Grokipedia will be driven with AI, while Wikipedia allows users to make edits to entries using certain approved sources

Musk said in a post on X, will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia

Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the XAI goal of understanding the universe

Straight Arrow News interviewed Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger about the announcement. Here's what he had to say

How do you feel about Elon Musk trying to build a competitor? Well, I hope he does a good job

I'm happy about it. I think that's great. The more encyclopedias in the world there are, the happier I am, I suppose, unless they're

extremely irresponsible. I do worry however that Grokpedia or whatever it going to be called will reflect the same sort of biases that Wikipedia has and that the Grok chatbot LLM has reflected

So in the last year or so, Grok, actually shortly after it rolled out

it started drifting to the left. And in the last six months, if you ask it a question on anything remotely political, anything having to do with the culture war, it answers from a left wing perspective

It's pretty annoying unless you actually support that. What do you make of the use of AI to build something like this

I've anticipated it for quite a while. For over a couple of years

I've been thinking about what's going to happen. I do think that AI can be used

to write a decent encyclopedia article. I done it myself I observed others using it to add articles to encyclopedias So I know it can be done and it can be done reasonably well

You said when I when I asked you this original question about Grokopedia and XAI, you said, I hope he does it right. What is your advice to make sure he does it right

Well, there are these prompts that are in the background when you make a query to a chat bot

So you type in your prompt, but then it's wrapped essentially by another prompt

And then the whole thing is submitted to the LLM, to the system

And it's possible to edit that wrapping so that it elicits a more fair and balanced sort of response

I would like to see that in Grok and I would like to see that reflected in Grokpedia but I not sure that we going to see that

I think Elon Musk and his people know that, of course, it's possible to edit those background prompts

I forget what they're called, but they clearly are not. They have not

Let's just put it this way. They have to know that the system as it exists now has the sort of biased result

Therefore, I think they must intend it. And if they intend it, that means that they're probably going to come up with a similarly biased encyclopedia

I hope not. I hope I'm wrong. But this is what I suspect

I'm Ray Bogan for Straight Arrow News. For more reporting straight from our nation's capital, download the SAN app