TWIBS: Elon Musk Unveils AI Wiki, Grokipedia, and Everybody Hates It
Claiming Wikipedia is full of propaganda, Elon Musk has released his own online encyclopedia powered by Grok, the Twitter AI. Unfortunately, like everything made using AI, it’s a huge steaming pile of hot garbage.
Humor by Aly Gibbs
This, my friends, is a banner day. Don’t get me wrong, we’re talking about something absolutely repulsive, truly despicable, totally disgusting… but it’s one of my favorite things to rant and rave about, and that means this takedown was a joy to write, because it came from the heart.
If you don’t happen to follow me on Bluesky, you may not know that I absolutely despise generative AI. I firmly believe it is evidence of the decay at the heart of man, and an amoral offense to the enduring human spirit. I think that one of the Great Filters is probably generative AI clogging up everyday life until society collapses. More than ever, I identify with Frank Herbert’s fictional Butlerian Jihad, and want nothing more than to wage literal warfare against Silicon Valley. I am terrified for the future of the human race as we advance into a cultural space so post-truth that we can no longer discern fact from fiction in any capacity, and believe that both the inventors and promulgators of this technology are so morally bankrupt, soulless and evil that they do not qualify as human beings anymore.
So like, I’m pretty against AI, you could say!
Now, the unholy trinity of darkness has ascended from the depths of hell to tear my mind asunder: Elon Musk, AI, and transphobia have joined forces to create the most repugnant and revolting stack of hallucinated lies you’ve ever laid eyes on.
On Monday, Musk (owner of X, stealer of ideas, ruiner of dreams) announced the launch of Grokipedia, an AI-generated alternative to Wikipedia. Yes, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit has been copied and transformed into the online house of horrors nobody can understand, and the world writ large is worse for it.
Musk describes Grokipedia as a repository of “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” but WIRED reports that the website pushes a lot of far-right viewpoints in articles that are otherwise mostly copy-and-pasted from Wikipedia. They mention absolutely unhinged lies like pornography worsening the AIDS epidemic and promotion of pseudoscientific ideas like Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.
A search for the word “transgender” on Grokipedia’s barebones UI yields 9,853 results, apparently, but I’m definitely not coming through all 822 pages of nonsense. Instead, we’ll talk about the article that’s just titled “transgender,” which starts out by describing men and women as… producers of small gametes and large gametes respectively! Oh, no, it’s JK Rowling’s favorite braindead definition of biological dimorphism!
Unsurprisingly, Grokipedia considers a Fox News article worthy of citing when stating that the number of people identifying as trans has gone down recently. Of course, the article itself cites a study that has been repeatedly debunked and, in fact, shows the opposite of what rags like Fox want you to believe.
The article goes on to describe gender as “socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and identities typically associated with biological sex, varying across cultures and time but often aligning with sexual dimorphism,” which is only really true if you pretend that gender non-conforming and intersex people have never existed. Suffice it to say, the word “typically” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, here.
Under a subhead titled “Theories of Causation,” Grokipedia declares that “psychological explanations” for the existence of transgender people “posit that gender dysphoria often emerges from underlying mental health dynamics rather than an innate, immutable mismatch between biological sex and identity.” It’s difficult to get a firm grasp on just how incorrect this is; the American Psychological Association says that “biological factors such as genetic influences and prenatal hormone levels, early experiences, and experiences later in adolescence or adulthood” may contribute to transgender identity, but openly admits that the diversity of trans expression and experiences makes any singular, straightforward explanation of our existence unlikely.
Most egregious, however, is every single thing written under the section titled “Controversies and Debates.” It’s such an unbelievable load of disinformation that I can’t properly encapsulate it here, now. I’m talking about misquoted studies, debunked articles, and outright lies, many of which are repeated verbatim more than once. The article here describes trans women as apex predators and full throttle perverts, without a shred of evidence to suggest these accusations are even based in this reality.
This article is, frankly, the poster child for every single thing I despise about generative AI. The hallucinations, the inherent bias, the theft of other people’s work—in this case, their shoddy work—to create a long-winded miasma of bullshit that can be used by your average undereducated bigot to argue for their narrow-minded beliefs. It speaks to the inability of your average person to do basic research or apply rudimentary critical thinking skills, and honestly, it just makes me sick to my damn stomach.
Musk claims that Wikipedia is full of propaganda, and that Grokipedia is meant to counter that. Where Wikipedia has a lot of strict rules about what makes it into an article (particularly when it comes to citing reliable sources), Grokipedia just steals Wiki articles and tacks on a bunch of made up nonsense with a bias towards Elon Musk’s rage fantasies about trans people.
I’m afraid we can only pray that the cost of these kinds of ventures, with absolutely no financial returns, will drive this entire experiment in douchery to its knees and behead it. Fingers crossed!
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
