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CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA - August 12, 2017: Members of a white supremacist group at a white nationalist rally that turned violent resulting in one death and multiple injuries.
SFGate columnist Drew Magary tested out Elon Musk's new "Wikipedia clone" known as Grokipedia and says he found it's full of racism, antisemitism and lies.
"There is nothing this man cannot make cheaper, wonkier and 20% more Hitler-y," Magary writes about Musk's latest foray into "his own optimized version of Wikipedia."
Groikpedia's entry on Adolf Hitler, for example, includes a “Debates and Intent on Functionality” section, "which is absent in Wiki’s entry on the man," Magary notes.
“The historiographical debate on the intent and functionality of Nazi racial policies, particularly the Holocaust, centers on whether the systematic extermination of Jews was the fulfillment of Adolf Hitler’s premeditated master plan or the unintended outcome of bureaucratic radicalization and wartime improvisation," Magary quotes Grokipedia, boldfacing the most egregious part.
"You already know about people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, so kudos to Grokipedia for introducing, 'The Holocaust was real, but also it was just a happy accident!' as a new means of discrediting Jewish history," Magary writes.
While Magary says no one knows who wrote that passage, the entry links to the Associated Press, but sourcing still remains vague.
"Musk’s site uses an ambiguous mix of crowdsourcing and its owner’s proprietary AI software — which he already appended to Twitter/X to predictably virulent results — to compose its more than 850,000 entries. I never would have sorted this without Wikipedia, so thanks, Wiki!" Magary says.
While Wikipedia remains non-profit and written entirely by humans, Musk's version is the antithesis, Magary explains.
"Elon Musk is perhaps, second to Donald Trump, our greatest disseminator of bad faith," he writes, with his priorities remaining clear.
"So it makes sense that he would cobble together a half-assed competitor to Wikipedia that is motivated by profit, and by his own demented worldview. Grokipedia exists strictly as a reactionary product, and that was plainly evident when I took the site for a test drive," Magary says.
The site, he says, is a mess, and an "attempt to rewrite the bulk of history" to suit Musk's "own ends."
"That’s why, when I tried to search for a “Grokipedia” entry on Grokipedia, I found no entry at all," Magary notes, adding that it's "More like WOKE-ipedia. Am I right, fellow plantation owners?! Huh? Anyway, if you think these suggested results make sense, then you’re on more ketamine than Musk himself."
In response to Slavery, Musk's "slurbot is free to denigrate Black and mixed race folks any way it pleases. Or it ignores denigration of those people entirely; there is no Grokipedia entry for the N-word," Magary says.
Musk, he writes, catered the site directly to his audience. "I got the feeling that his pet project tweaked the hot button entries to tilt MAGA, and then just stole content for all of the normal s——," he writes.
"This is the whitewashing machine at work," Magary explains, whose intention is to spread racist lies.
"It has no real purpose other than to strategically plant lies into a reference manual. This renders it not only a malevolent product, but a lousy one. But hey, maybe Elon didn’t mean for his baby to be such a piece of s——. Maybe it was just the unintended outcome of bureaucratic radicalization and wartime improvisation," Magary concludes.