Elon Musk’s reply to Wikipedia is now right here. On Monday, Musk introduced that his personal on-line encyclopedia, Grokipedia, was now dwell.
In keeping with Musk, the present model of Grokipedia is barely “model 0.1” however he claimed that it is already “higher than Wikipedia.”
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Up till just a few years in the past, Elon Musk regularly shared hyperlinks to Wikipedia entries on X, then often known as Twitter. Nevertheless, since he has taken a flip into far-right politics, Musk has turn out to be a significant critic of Wikipedia, claiming it has a left-wing bias. He has just lately began referring to the positioning as “Wokipedia” and has made calls to “defund” or cease donating to Wikimedia, the nonprofit that runs the platform.
Nevertheless, for supposedly being higher than Wikipedia, Musk’s Grokipedia seems to tear off a big quantity of content material from it.
For instance, as The Verge seen, the Grokipedia entry for the Sony online game console PlayStation 5 is a whole word-for-word copy of the Wikipedia entry for PlayStation 5. Musk’s Grokipedia even copied and pasted the very same desk of contents for the totally different sections of the PlayStation 5 entry. Even the cited exterior sources are the identical, though it seems Grokipedia has modified the order of how they’re listed.
Left:
Credit score: Wikipedia
Proper:
Credit score: Grokipedia / Wikipedia
Grokipedia did add one factor to its PlayStation 5 entry that is not discovered on the Wikipedia model. A disclaimer on the very backside of the web page, which admits that it “tailored” the content material from Wikipedia.
“The content material is tailored from Wikipedia, licensed underneath Inventive Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License,” it reads. As a result of Wikipedia content material is printed underneath the Inventive Commons public license, Grokipedia can republish its content material underneath sure circumstances.
Mashable Gentle Velocity
The copying drawback seems to be in depth. We used the plagiarism detection service Copyscape to examine the Grokipedia entry for the Titanic, and Copyscape discovered that 18 % of the web page, or about 3,600 phrases, have been copied word-for-word from Wikipedia. On the prime of Grokipedia’s entry, it accommodates this discover: “Truth-checked by Grok yesterday.”
Left:
Credit score: Wikipedia
Proper:
Credit score: Grokipedia / Wikipedia
That implies that Grokipedia is meant extra as a fact-checking device than a real various to Wikipedia.
Not like Wikipedia, which has human editors who volunteer to contribute to the positioning, Musk’s Grok AI is accountable for the content material that will get posted on Grokipedia. And evidently in lots of instances, Grok is simply scraping Wikipedia entries of their entirety and pasting its contents on Grokipedia’s personal web site.
Social media customers are persevering with to find quite a few Grokipedia entries which can be lifted immediately from the corresponding Wikipedia entries, typically with no modifications.
The Grokipedia entry for composer Franz Liszt? Plagiarized from Wikipedia. The Grokipedia entry for the Miller Impact? Copied sentence-by-sentence from the Wikipedia article. Grokipedia’s web page for the PC-98? Taken from Wikipedia.
One Wikipedia contributor discovered their very own contribution to an entry was copied line-for-line and printed on Grokipedia.
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So, how does Grokipedia differ from the supposedly woke Wikipedia?
Among the extra politically charged articles on Grokipedia seem to have been rewritten with the intention to add a right-leaning bent, however an unlimited portion of Musk’s Wikipedia various seems to simply be Wikipedia itself.
