Don't Ask Grokipedia Where Obama Was Born

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We’d like for our sources to be unbiased. They shouldn’t exclude information based on whether it supports a particular narrative—they should consider every piece of evidence, whether the source is trustworthy, and provide the conclusions that follow from careful reasoning. If Elon Musk believes this, he (well, his employees) probably told Grok something like that when prompting the model into writing Grokipedia, his new alternative to Wikipedia. But whatever instructions were given to Grok, the results are bad, and not just “I’m a liberal and I don’t like Musk” bad, but “I think my encyclopedia should dismiss the idea Obama was born in Kenya” bad. Here’s the third paragraph from the article on birtherism:

Despite these releases and verifications, claims persisted among skeptics who cited forensic examinations of the digital files revealing layered PDF artifacts suggestive of manipulation, inconsistencies in the certificate’s timestamps and formatting compared to contemporaneous Hawaiian records, and the absence of public access to original microfilmed vital records or hospital logs for independent empirical validation. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse, after a multi-year probe, concluded in 2012 and 2016 that the long-form certificate was likely a forgery, attributing doubts to causal discrepancies in document creation rather than mere speculation. Numerous lawsuits challenging Obama’s eligibility were filed but uniformly dismissed by federal courts on procedural grounds like lack of standing, without substantive review of the evidentiary disputes. The episode highlighted tensions between official institutional affirmations and demands for transparent, first-hand data scrutiny, with polls indicating lingering public skepticism even post-release.

If I’m reading this article as someone who believes Obama is not a natural-born citizen, I’m thinking “I knew it. There was evidence of manipulation, and even an official concluded the certificate was a fake after a multi-year probe. The case was shut down by corrupt federal courts who ignored evidence, probably Obama’s hired goons.”

Lots of pages on Grokipedia seem to have been deliberately built to provide permission slips for deranged conspiracy theories. The Pizzagate page reads like a compilation of evidence for the theory. This part isn’t even true:

Theorists claimed the restaurant’s basement concealed tunnels or holding areas for trafficked children, drawing on architectural anomalies and unverified reports of subterranean access, while pointing to Alefantis’s [the owner’s] Instagram posts (later made private) featuring images of bound children, pizza-themed art with suggestive captions like “#murder” on toddler photos, and symbols interpreted as pedophilic insignia.

The “#murder” claim appears to have come from a photo not of toddlers but of a restaurant freezer, which he joked about looking like a place where you would store bodies. The “bound children” claim comes from this post, where, as Alefantis explained, his goddaughter is depicted playing with her sister. This is only strong evidence for child sex trafficking if you believe child sex trafficking is more common than kids playing with tape. It’s certainly not something you should describe as an image of “bound children” without elaboration.

Almost all of the standard fare for conspiracy theories are presented in an “unbiased” way by Grokipedia. The “9/11 truth movement” page opens by talking about “researchers, professionals, and advocates” who question the “official explanation” for 9/11. I’m thankful that Grokipedia treats climate change as a real phenomenon caused by humans (though that’s a really weird thing to include alongside these other beliefs?) and that it treats Area 51 as a classified government facility rather than a secret holding grounds for alien technology. But there is clearly a lot of room for improvement in the sanity department.

It seems like it isn’t strictly illegal to copy Wikipedia, because Grokipedia has done this multiple times. This has probably been done thousands of times, because though I could link you to a Twitter/X user’s example, I immediately found a copied article when I looked for one. My favorite Wikipedia article is the article on the hard problem of consciousness and the Grokipedia article is copied word-for-word, at least for the first few paragraphs that I checked. A simple disclaimer or a link to the Wikipedia article could fix this problem, but it seems that being transparent about copying Wikipedia’s homework would be too embarrassing.

Murder and Euphemisms

On October 1st, 2056, Suzie Brown was murdered in her bedroom while lying asleep in her cozy suburban neighborhood just north of downtown Houston. Evidence in the form of a stray hair led to a DNA test linking the murder to her ex-boyfriend Terry, who was sentenced to life in prison.

We can imagine an encyclopedia article describing the murder, and we can imagine this article to be really bad. Here’s how that might look:

The murder of Suzie Brown occurred on October 1st, 2056, in her bedroom in northern Houston. According to her ex-boyfriend, Terry Popov, he had been invited to stay with her and entered her room only to discover satanic imagery covering the walls and Suzie holding a knife, leading to a struggle between the two that ended in her death. The official narrative claims that Popov murdered Brown in her sleep, and he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Popov maintains that officials connected to Brown covered up the real circumstances of the killing and regrets that the struggle ended in her death.

For the purposes of this story, we can assume that a lot of what Terry is saying is true. Maybe Suzie was a fan of Black Sabbath and had a poster of a devil on her wall along with an assortment of gothic items. When she realized Terry had entered her home, she might have grabbed the pocket knife used for the killing from her bedside and stood there in her room, terrified, before Terry entered. Things could have spiraled out of control from there. But if we wanted to write an unbiased article about the murder, we would absolutely not begin it in the way I described. Terry is the murderer. You don’t begin an article about a murderer by citing the murderer, especially if a jury of their peers convicted them.

Here’s how Grokipedia begins its article on the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is an ongoing full-scale military conflict that escalated on 24 February 2022, when Russian forces advanced into Ukrainian territory from multiple directions including Russia proper, Belarus, and Russian-held Crimea, intensifying the broader Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and proxy fighting in the Donbas region. In official Russian terminology, the action constitutes a “special military operation” aimed at demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine, protecting ethnic Russians and Russian speakers from alleged persecution in Donbas, and preventing Ukraine’s integration into NATO to neutralize threats to Russian security.

There are Nazis in Ukraine, and I’m sure there are ethnic Russians in the Donbas who have faced something like persecution and maybe worse. But citing the offender isn’t an unbiased treatment of any issue. The trustworthiness of the offender is especially questionable when they’re an authoritarian dictatorship with a history of killing people who publicize information that contradicts the official narrative.¹ This is a country that invaded another country, killing thousands and displacing millions, supposedly out of humanitarian concern. Imagine if we really did invade Venezuela for being a socialist dictatorship, as has recently been suggested, killed tens of thousands of people, and triggered a refugee crisis—only for Wikipedia to describe the events as a “special military operation” in official American terminology.

The closest Wikipedia article to one covering a subject like that is the Iraq War article, which begins like this:

The Iraq War (Arabic: حرب العراق, romanized: ḥarb al-ʿirāq), also referred to as the Second Gulf War, was a prolonged conflict in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. It began with the invasion by a United States-led coalition, which resulted in the overthrow of the Ba’athist government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict persisted as an insurgency that arose against coalition forces and the newly established Iraqi government. US forces were officially withdrawn in 2011. In 2014, the US became re-engaged in Iraq, leading a new coalition under Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve, as the conflict evolved into the ongoing Islamic State insurgency.

No euphemism for invasion is dropped while citing the American government. The statement of the overthrow isn’t laced with any description of the evils committed by Hussein’s regime, even though those are assuredly real.

I don’t think Wikipedia is perfect. Here’s a study finding a left-wing slant, and another one. Editors, being very-online liberals, have a habit of associating right-of-center figures with more negative terms and describing issues with a left-wing slant. But the response to those problems shouldn’t involve respect for birtherism or the 9/11 truth movement. Any encyclopedia that seeks to provide its users with the truth should, when justified in doing so, dismiss conspiracy theories as conspiracy theories and nothing more. Like American car manufacturers finally exposed to foreign competition, I hope that those involved with maintaining Wikipedia take this as good reason to reform their site. But right now, Toyota is trying to sell cars in the US for the first time, and the engines are exploding.

1. This is not clearly described in the article; you can check here for more information about his anti-corruption work.