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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[–] 180 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

The man can literally afford to have a legal harem island, fund an entertainment company to create anything to amuse him, AND solve world hunger simultaneously...and he just fawns over Hitler.

His wealth is truly wasted.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago*

    Apparently owning the libs, snorting ketamine to the point of pissing yourself and dick jokes are more important than anything you mentioned.

    Also Donald Trump needs a lot of money. The other tech dickheads bending over backwards are not enough.

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  • [–] 44 points 11 months ago* (9 children)

    Conservapedia already did this something like twenty years ago. It missed the entire purpose of the project, which was to invite a kaleidoscope of specialists and journalists to document the volume of known information categorically, primarily through citation to other online works.

    Instead, you had a basket case of ultra-orthodox ideologues carving out a very niche set of contrary opinion posts that weren't well documented or continuously maintained.

    Conservapedia isn't a right wing vanity project because of it's hot takes on Hitler, it's a vanity project because of the yawning gulfs in it's data set. Nobody engages with the site, because it is so heavily censored.

    I get the sense Grokapedia will suffer the same fate. If a subject doesn't tickle Musk's interest, it'll either go undocumented or be a naked plagarization of some other online encyclopedia. And as soon as Musk loses interest entirely, support for the service will go the same way as so many private vanity projects.

    Incidentally, Wikipedia's fate is also an open question. What happens when Jimmy Wales can't administer and fundraise for it anymore? How long until some hacks get their hooks in and corrupt it like so many other private media outlets?

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    That's exactly why it's freely licensed, because we can't even trust King Jimbo.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I mean, just having the ability to roll up your own Wiki is very handy.

    I would appreciate a way to archive the citations, so that a link-break down the line doesn't cause the raw data to be lost. But that's a problem with copywrite and IP more than anything Wikipedia does natively.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Queue the return of the door to door Encyclopedia salesman. Soon everyone will have a World Book Encyclopedia set in their home again!

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    educated reality has a liberal bent

    conservatives don’t like this

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    I wish it did. Unfortunately, conservatives seem to rule our world far more often than not.

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  • [–] 33 points 11 months ago (16 children)

    Thanks for reminding me to leave a donation on Wikipedia, seriously if we lose Wikipedia we are fucked.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (12 children)
  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (10 children)

    ... idk, if Wikipedia is pissing off Deepak Chopra, I'm pretty sure that's a good thing...


    edit: I think my downvote probably warrants a less flippant explanation. In the past decade, Wikipedia has started explicitly labeling pseudoscience and "alternative medicine" as such, as opposed to their original policy of being so "neutral" they would say things like "some people think this is bogus, but some people think not". This has, understandably, pissed those people off, and I suppose in some sense they are right? But in this era of widespread and accelerated sanewashing, I think saying these (true!) things does matter, and the people getting pissed off are really just telling on themselves. I would invite you to read the Wikipedia articles on the quoted public figures for yourself, and verify that they really were slandered the way they describe.

    tangentially-related Hank Green video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (9 children)

    I should have specified: I don't agree with every part of the article, but I shared it for this excerpt:

    The Wikimedia Foundation solicits donations from Wikipedia users every year, even though its expenses ($2 million to run hosting and servers) are vanishingly small compared to its profits. Wikimedia has increased its spending over 1000% since 2008 and sits on $97.6 million in assets as of 2016.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (5 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (4 children)

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

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

    I prefer the term "commensalist"

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 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

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    ah okay, I think sharing that entire article is kinda endorsing all the weird stuff in it, but thanks for specifying.

    I know those are large numbers, but like, Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the internet? "$97.6 million in assets" is peanuts to that (compare it to any other website in a similar range!). The fact that they don't have that much operating costs is a good thing, right? It means they're efficient, which is what people love to complain about with non-profits.

    Anyway, it's not like they ask for much--I think the last fundraiser I saw they were asking for $2.75 a year, if you felt like they provided you that much value over the year. I certainly do, and I donate $10/year to them. If you don't feel like Wikipedia is worth that cost to you that's fair--but I think telling other people that they shouldn't donate because it objectively(?) isn't worth it is a strange thing to do.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago*

    Operating expenses don't necessarily equate to total expenditure. The article also mentions that fifteen executives took home a six-figure salary in 2015; that doesn't strike me as particularly efficient.

    Notwithstanding, what I originally said was not prescriptive. People are free to spend their money as they see fit. Even I have donated to the Wikimedia Foundation in the past and still believe that they provide invaluable resources for the common good.

    Where I take issue is the fact that the messaging in their campaigns often gives the impression that the organization is scraping by on user donations, whereas in reality they're sitting on a pile of assets that would ostensibly be in the 99.9ᵗʰ percentile of household net worth in the US.

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  • [+] 50 points 11 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 66 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (19 children)

    Musk is clearly a Nazi.

    First, there's the Nazi salute. There's no reason to do that unless you are a Nazi.

    Second, Nazis called Hitler my Furer, and he's rewriting it this way specifically for this reason. It is an honorific title and he's showing honor to Hitler.

    Third, Musk deflects from accusations he's a Nazi ("that's a crazy thing to say") but he never responds by saying "What Hitler did was horrible and I'm not a Nazi and detest their ideology" which is what someone would say if not a Nazi.

    The scary thing about this is Musk will soon control a large robot army. At that point, he could appoint white supremacists to lead the robot army and pick up where Hitler left off. This is a real threat for Jewish people as well as other minorities.

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  • [–] 24 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Third, Musk deflects from accusations he’s a Nazi (“that’s a crazy thing to say”) but he never responds by saying “What Hitler did was horrible and I’m not a Nazi and detest their ideology” which is what someone would say if not a Nazi.

    This is the most important point, IMO. Fascists who want mainstream acceptance know not to have swastika tattoos and not to openly say they love Hitler. They will always try to have some plausible deniability. Don't get dragged into their bullshit arguments. There's no point in debating whether the nazi salute was some other motion that was misinterpreted. Even if it was, the first thing a non-nazi would do would be to clarify that they are not a nazi and don't want nazis to think they're their allies. Even if Musk had completely inadvertently stumbled upon the love and support of the nazis via a series of misunderstandings (lol), at this point in time he is deliberately choosing to be part of them.

    Here is Musk at 3:08:01 saying he's not a nazi... and then going on to say you're not a nazi unless you're literally invading Poland and doing the holocaust. That is literally the only objectionable thing about the nazis. Not their "fashion sense or mannerisms". Yes that was a direct quote. There is really only one type of person that would not mention as objectionable the nazi ideology or all the acts of violence that are not at the same scale as the holocaust.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    "I'm not a Nazi, I just like the esthetics of someone else's blood on my black uniform"

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago

    Most people do, feeling of power or at least positive connection to someone's feeling of power are very intoxicating. I even wonder how many 16 years old girls you knew when you were in high school. No justice or mercy there if you try to keep moral high ground and ignore that component. (I did, LOL.)

    The thing about Nazis is that they've lost, so one could get pretty believable feeling of power from their own military and patriotic aesthetic in most of the western nations and socialist bloc, while Nazis would be something of that past with fraktur lettering and stylish evil. A bit like vampires.

    Now, today both western and Soviet patriotic aesthetic have kinda rotten. The Soviet kind is associated with murderous madness between two strongest former members, the western kind is associated with paying 20x the right money to kill brown people in their homeland without even getting their oil in the end.

    While Nazis, eh, lost. So haven't lived till now and are remembered young and cute, so to say.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (9 children)

    He's just an edgelord. He thinks he's funny and edgy and everyone wants to be his friend. Inside he's a scared little boy who wants his daddy to love him but his daddy is a nazi who hates him.

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  • [–] 29 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    do you know that you can an edglord doing nazi shit? a nazi. no matter the motivation, he's still a nazi.

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  • [–] -5 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    I did know that. But I think you give him more credit of self-awareness than he has. Elon Musk is a vacuous ego with a lot of money. I don't believe he has the depth of mind to actually hold any political ideology, for good or ill. I think he is singularly focused on being the Best Boy, and will ape anything that helps him feel that way.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago

    You make it sound as if Naziism is a political ideology and not just a hate cult. everyone who is a nazi because of self serving reasons is still a nazi, even if they are stupid or so drugged that one might question if they have any agency. they are still nazis.

    Most nazis are really stupid and irrational and don't need a reason either, still nazis.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    You're probably right. He was the lib-left's Best Boy a few years back, was gonna solve climate change and do cool science shit and whatever, but then I forget what exactly happened but he kinda swung the other direction.

    Motivation probably doesn't matter too much. It just highlights the systemic problem of allowing one person to have that much money-power.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    He loved being the left's guy, but then the federal government started investigating his companies and he realized that he needed Trump to keep him out of trouble. He literally said in an interview that if Harris won, "I'm fucked." Now that he's aligned with the most hated administration in history, he's holing up and keeping quiet. He got what he needed, and I'm assuming that now he's hoping we'll all forget and he'll cozy up to the Democrats if they ever regain power.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    even edgelord vacuous nazis are just that: nazis. No matter the reason, or if it's meant "ironically", they're a nazi. There's no excusing it, or softening it, they're a full blown nazi.

    He did the nazi salute on stage, at least twice, he holds extreme right-wing and white supremacist views, he is a nazi.

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Isn't "Furer" just the German word for leader? I'm pretty sure the word existed before Hitler and the Nazis I don't think they invented it.

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  • [–] 41 points 11 months ago (11 children)

    I wonder how (or if) grokopedia defines "woke"?

    Most of the people who complain about "the woke" arent able to define it.

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  • [–] 43 points 11 months ago (10 children)

    Not sure if you heard but according to the CEO of Palantir in an interview he gave a few weeks ago, there is now "woke left" and "woke right."

    Basically anybody on the right who wakes up and smells the bullshit in the narrative is "woke." Like if you believe in those "crazy conspiracy theories" that say Palantir is up to some evil villain shit, you're woke.

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    It's kind of hilarious that a word literally derived from "awoken" in pronunciation, spelling, and meaning is these people's prime insult.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    According to Peter Thiel Greta Thunberg is the Anti-Christ because she believes in people coming together and pressuring the UN. Anything to avoid accountability with these people.

    When they rail against "one world government" it just makes me think it's a good idea.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    I mean they want a one government, they just want to be the ones in charge of that one government.

    The entire argument is that it's somehow safer bc it's a private corporation/business, and not the government. Except it's a private monopoly protected and contracted by the fucking government!

    The only way that argument could possibly make the slightest bit of sense would be in an imaginary world where there was legitimate competition between other corporations (but if that was the case corporations probably wouldn't exist) and the American people actually had some say in which private company got government contracts.

    Instead, government officials (who are allegedly the reason we have to turn to private businesses bc we can't trust the government) are buying stock in private companies, and then handing government contracts to the fucking private companies where they own stock.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    Isn't the pope the new anti-christ?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    He has claimed like a dozen people are either the anti-christ or working with the anti-christ. The Pope and Greta are just a few he has named. One of them is just this former co-worker he doesn't like lol.

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  • [–] 20 points 11 months ago

    Grokipedia would strip out the “woke” from Wikipedia

    So are they removing the pages on Insomnia?

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    It’s the holidays and he misses his dad…

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    What's the difference between this garbage and Conservapedia?

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Conservapedia is worse, remarkably.

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  • [–] 30 points 11 months ago

    I don't believe Elon sees any of this honestly. In his eyes, this is what it is: racist and highly propogandized bullshit. This is because Elon is a racist, highly politically bias asshole.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Simply put, Leon Hitler is a shitbag neo-Nazi.

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    That’s the official turd Reich history. If we don’t win this will be what children will learn in the Shitler youth soon.

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  • [–] 20 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    So the space obsessed man-child generated his own stupid encyclopedia, and for this generous all-giving knowledge resource he chooses a stylized BLACK HOLE for the logo.

    It feels like the nerd equivalent to that quote about how the anti-semite arguing in bad faith enjoys seeing others frustrated by their hypocrisy. Here lemme just find that pasta...

    Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

    Jean-Paul Sartre

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  • [–] 19 points 11 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 24 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    Remember when he did that Nazi salute, and we kept hearing it totally wasn't a Nazi salute, and the Trump administration kept saying that we were all just looking for imaginary things to be outraged over?

    Then why is he having Grok rewrite Wiki and calling Hitler the Führer, Bart?

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago (13 children)

    Tbh, from a historical point of view, The Führer was used to describe Hitler. Now in Germany, it's basically only used to refer to him.

    I'm not for deleting history, and I think the context is important. People needs to know why The Führer or "der Führer" is bad.

    A context which I think would have helped in another example would be the N-word. If everyone was really taught the history around that word, I think/hope alot of people would think twice before using it today.

    Or is that only me?

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Mentioning Adolf Hitler's title (Führer) is fine (and the information about such title should be included in the wikipedia artcile about him) but why refer to him accross the article by such title?

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    That's a good point. But The Führer is not something positive, and I wouldnt think much about it.

    I'm don't think this was an intentional way to make him sound better. I think we should be much more aware of fact checking what it says, than overusing a historical word to describe Hitler. That might just be an AI thing.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (9 children)

    honorific one clause later, writing that Hitler served as “Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934 until his suicide in 1945.”

    if it’s his honorific and not his official title then that should be clarified… Musk is a nazi, i’m sure grokepedia is a bunch of revisionist bullshit, but it’s not really the smoking gun and seems more like grok not groking the difference between his title and nickname.

    also it pisses me off that they stole grok from the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    It's not that clear really. His official titles would've been president and chancellor and he only got one of those in a manner the Weimar constitution legally envisioned. So the system, by which we would decide what an official title is today, was abused and then suspended all together. The title "der Führer" was basically a google translate from "il duce" in Italy and is not entirely honorific because he was leader of the Nazi party first. And he continues to be referred to by this semi-unofficial, semi-honorific title even in history books today and they don't always bother to disambiguate or add that they mean it sarcastically. So while Grok should be shot into space. And Nazi saluting Melon Usk deserves to be under this much scrutiny and more and can otherwise go eff himself as far as I'm concerned. The Ockham's razor for this gaff tells me the LLM just regurgitated book knowledge and nobody bothered to filter this with 2025 sensibilities. Not great but also more of a storm in a teacup. This won't make the top ten of atrocious things coming from the Melon.

    I was also looking for a word other than 'honorific.' I find it has a positive connotation and should not apply to the titles of such infamous individuals as Hitler or Mussolini. But I could not come up with anything snappy.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    "Grok" comes from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, where it was a Martian loan-word.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Grok is also a word in hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and is specifically named as the inspiration for Grok….
    but thanks for playing “i read google ai overview”

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    As a long-time fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide, I have no memory of the word 'grok' appearing, and the internet at large appears to agree.

    I read Stranger in a Strange Land a couple decades ago, and the word is presented in a way that's pretty easy to remember where you got it from.

    I don't tend to use Google AI overview or any other such tools to get answers like this to quip back at people, and I'd appreciate if you didn't just assume I did.

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