ChatGPT: A Fan of Wikipedia?
May 18, 2026
Chatbots seem brilliant to some people. Lawyers find that chatbots can assist with some legal functions. A handful of lawyers have been chastised by judges for submitting documents containing made up information. But, hey, what’s the problem? A blue chip consulting firm output a white paper with some hallucinated AI blatherings. No big deal. Blue chip consulting firms are into smart software. Most clients won’t know that AI does the work or if they do, the clients do not care.
Some online services lean on Wikipedia. For a period of time, Wikipedia would routinely appear at the top of some Google search results. Now, well, times change. Chatbots still pull some information from popular sources such as Wikipedia. The Guardian reported that ChatGPT found Mr. Musk’s smart service a useful fountain of data. “Guardian Found OpenAI’s Platform Cited Grokipedia On Topics Including Iran And Holocaust Deniers.” Grok is, as I recall, now the subject of a criminal investigation for some of its behaviors. The Wikification of Grok is an interesting development.
Is Wikipedia a biased source of information? I looked up Hopf fibration and found that the information was objective. However, whenever humans create information, my view is that outputs are indeed biased. That’s the nature of humans thinking, saying, and writing their own versions of information. In an ideal world, Encyclopedia Brittanica, World Bookl, and Wikipedia would be objective. Unfortunately editorial boards get involved. Bias goes along for the ride.
Elon Musk (did I mention the criminal issue in France) allegedly started his own “free” encyclopedia. The name of Mr. Musk’s version of Wikipedia appears to be related to the original Wikipedia. Does Grokipedia sound like a Wikipedia derivative to you? It seems to me that the two names are similar. The “grok” is jargon for knowing or understanding. The word “grok” may have been a neologism included in “Stranger in a Strange Land.”
But Grokipedia is the result of smart software, not human contributors. Mr. Musk is confident that his Grok AI is not as biased as humans writing encyclopedia entries. Is Grok biased? The Guardian reports:
“Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who has worked on LLM grooming, said ChatGPT’s citing Grokipedia raised similar concerns. While Musk may not have intended to influence LLMs, Grokipedia entries she and colleagues had reviewed were ‘relying on sources that are untrustworthy at best, poorly sourced and deliberate disinformation at worst’ she said”
How easy or difficult is it to remove information from the AI-generated Grokipedia? The difficult parts might be handed over to Mr. Musk’s capable AI. However, removing information from indexes or matrices and other complicated data constructs is possible but costly in terms of compute.
I know that Mr. Musk has knobs and dials that he or his colleagues can turn, spin, fiddle, and slide to amplify or suppress certain types of information. Mr. Musk has notified the British regulators that X.com can remove 85 percent of terror and hate related information from X.com posts. Mr. Musk has taken a different approach to the allegations that Grok AI has generated pornographic images. His stance in the UK suggests one capability; his approach in France has asserted a different position.
I want to return to the information in Wikipedia. Is Grok less biased than Wikipedia? If yes, what is the definition and criteria used to define “biased”? I interpret Mr. Musk’s own assertions about his company’s ability to filter information at the astounding level of 85 percent or above indicates that Grok and X.com have a super power. Either service can inject or remove bias at will. Since any human generated content on which an AI system is trained evidences bias, I believe that we must live with “alternative biases.”
Whitney Grace, May 18, 2026
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