Grokipedia Is Cringe

0:03Hello and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds web online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support to subscribe. Go to 404media.co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the 404 Media co-founders, the first being Sam Cole, Emmanuel Mayberg, and Jason Kebler. Hello, hello. The merch is here. The merch is here. Merch alert. It's here. And which merch is that?

0:44That's the new design? The new stuff, the old stuff, restock. It's a lot of stuff. Flying off the shelves. Yeah. I mean, get it while you can. But if you pre-ordered, I'll be mailing it probably today. Hopefully today. Hopefully it'll be in the mail by the time you hear this. What does that process involve? if you go to the place we buy it from and then you throw it into a bunch, you have a whole system. I mean, honestly, it involves me printing out many labels and sticking them on these green envelopes and then digging through boxes and seeing what people ordered and send them. It's extraordinary.

1:27It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, I will say. But I do have it down. I have a cool label maker. I put stickers in them. which you can see here. See on here for audio listeners. He's flicking them around. And now he's walked off. I've got a box of stuff here. This is like stuff that I already had, but it's like I have these green envelopes. A label maker. I stick them on. All with love. Did we choose green envelopes for the brand? Yeah. Awesome. Done with love. We are going to become like a fashion brand that does journalism on the side, I think. Like the merch is going to take over. Don't you think, Jason?

2:13I mean, that's the hope. It's a stable industry. I don't know if that's actually true. I don't know.

2:21And with tariffs and everything. It's just people need clothes, you know. That's true. All right. Yeah. Get your orders in if you want some merch. I'm definitely going to get one of the new sweatshirts. Rarely other... brief bit of housekeeping, shameless plug. My book is coming out in paperback on November 11th. It's about how the FBI secretly ran an encrypted phone company to wiretap the world in the largest sting operation ever. You've probably heard me talk about it a bunch. The paperback comes with loads more detail in the epilogue. You know, I spoke to more government officials, more people directly involved in selling the phones, all of that.

3:02So you can get an updated copy there. And And of course, being paperback, it's going to be probably easier to carry around with you and read. I'm just going to give this discount code to 404 Media listeners as well. If you use the code WIRE20 at the link in the show notes, you get 20 % off. I'll put in the show notes as well. Shameless plug. I will move on. Can we do another shameless plug now, Emmanuel, for a friend's book? Another shameless plug for Becky Ferreira's book called First Contact, The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens. So Becky writes the abstract, which is our science newsletter.

3:39Everybody loves the newsletter. To know Becky is to love her. She's such a beautiful, wonderful writer. I am reading this book right now and it's no different. I don't know what I was expecting. I never really talked to Becky about the book, but it's not what I expected. It's really more a work of anthropology about what our obsession with aliens is about and where it comes from and what it has meant throughout the ages. And it's just like really beautifully written and just includes a ton of really interesting, surprising research that I had no idea about. So highly recommend that. It's on Amazon.

4:18It's on every bookstore, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook. Please get it. And we are launching a new interview podcast. I mean, it's going to be on the same feed that you'll listen to now. But then you've already got a tease of this from Jason did an interview about Windows 10. I did one ages ago with the head of Signal. Sam did one about Pornhub, I think even before that, but we're going to be doing more of those every week. And I bring that up because one of the people on the show will be Becky, right, Emmanuel? Yeah, we'll do a deep dive into her book. And I'm really looking forward to that. All right.

4:58Sounds good. Let's get to this week, this exhausting week. We record this on Tuesdays and it already feels like it's Friday because so much has been going on. But the headline of this one, the Jason wrote is, Grokipedia is the antithesis of everything that makes Wikipedia good, useful, and human. Jason, what do people see when they go to grokipedia.com? I mean, I believe it's dark mode only. Like, it's a black window with a search box. And it's just like, search for, you know, it's like Wikipedia. Like, it's a clone of Wikipedia is what they are attempting to do. All right. But what is this then?

5:43So you go there and I'm going to do some searches while you're talking because I haven't poked around it yet. But what is Grokipedia? I'm sure people can guess from the word grok in it. I mean, it's Elon Musk's like butthurt competitor. He calls it a competitor to Wikipedia, which he calls Wokipedia. And basically it is an LLM that calls itself an encyclopedia. It looks like Wikipedia in many ways. And it is like explicitly an ideological project of Elon Musk to like de-wokeify Wikipedia, which he does not like for many reasons. But the main reason being he doesn't like what his articles, what the Wikipedia article for Elon Musk says about him.

6:27So this has been like one of his little pet projects for like quite some time is one, like railing against Wikipedia and then two, like funding or creating some sort of alternative to Wikipedia. But of course, you know, as denoted by the name, Grokipedia is entirely AI generated. It is not like Wikipedia at all in terms of form or function. It's as though you just like told an AI to make something that looks like an encyclopedia. and it turned out exactly how you might think it would turn out. And to belabor the question, how did it turn out then? It's just like a bunch of inaccurate crap. Like, what are we talking about?

7:12So what it reminds me most of is Google's AI summaries. Honestly, it's like you type something into a box and then there's an article or it's trying to answer a question at the top. The difference is that Grokipedia is like a website in that it has articles on bespoke topics. So right now it says that there's 885 ,000 articles available. So if you type in Twitter, there's a page for that. If you type in presidents of the United States, there's a page for that. And the page is not changing based on an inquiry. So it's not like a chat bot. But it's like a static website that has been created with AI-generated content.

8:05It is pretty minimalist. So again, it's like black screen, white text. There's no images. There are not really links. Yeah, there's not links in line. They have the little citations like they do on Wikipedia. So it does say where it's taking the information from. Notably, links to Wikipedia itself seem to be banned. There's been a few places in articles where it has leaked some of the internal instructions for Grokipedia. And it says, like, oh, I'm not allowed to cite Wikipedia. And they also have little headlines like Wikipedia does. So I have the Twitter one pulled up. It has a summary at the top, and then it has a section called history.

8:58And it says founding and early development of Twitter. And it goes on and on and on. As to whether it's all made up drivel, I feel like LLMs are getting to the point where yes, there are hallucinations. And surely there are hallucinations in this as well. but it's like people who have dug deep into this have found inaccuracies. But for the most part, it's like, it's more that it's surface level, like extraordinarily surface level, like recitation of facts versus it just being like totally all bullshit. There is like a, there's a right wing slant specifically, and it has been programmed to have a right wing slant.

9:43Wire did a good piece about some examples of that. But if you fell onto Grokipedia today and you started typing things in, you'd be like, wow, there are some facts here. Interestingly, every single article is extraordinarily long, which I think is probably a function of the fact that it's AI generated. It doesn't really know when to stop, I think. And it's, in my opinion, organized really weird. um you know it just has things like kind of out of order it puts like import like quote unquote like important things like at the bottom of the article this twitter um this article on twitter is like many thousands of words long for example and it's just like i don't know it's it's just a super surface level in my opinion i don't know have any of you like played around with it at all um i was just looking through what wired found and the headline of that one was elon musk's grokipedia pushes far right talking points and yeah they went through it and you know they found the entry on transgender referring to trans women as quote biological males all of that sort of thing kind of exactly what you would expect from a grokipedia or one leaning in that direction or anything i guess it's so surface level because if you start to dig into actual more of the facts and more of the nuance it turns out that reality has a left-leaning bias because i don't know it's just based on fucking reality and real things and science um but i don't know so who i guess i guess what i mean by that is like there's an entry for like the word printer like a computer printer and it says a printer is a peripheral machine which makes a durable representation of graphics or text usually on paper it's like okay true that's like i mean it's which is just to say like you don't go there and it's not like complete drivel it's just um there's lots of things in here that are not political just as there are many many wikipedia entries about anything you could possibly imagine um and so like if you just type in a random word there'll be an entry for it and you're not going to read it and be like this is completely like bullshit ai you'll be like this is just like a series of facts like laid out in a in a way that is not terribly useful right or interesting or anything like that um to zoom out you said you know musk makes it because he doesn't like his own wicker pd page and that sort of thing but There's a broader context here, right, in that even some lawmakers have issues with Wikipedia, like Ted Cruz.

12:33What's been the recent context in people on the right or kind of all over the place, especially on the right, having issues with Wikipedia? What's the context there? Yeah, so I mean, Wikipedia is this very international project. And as such, it operates in a lot of countries that have authoritarian governments. And it has a lot of anti-censorship aspects to it. Um, you know, there are millions of editors worldwide and they're in countries all over the place. So it's not like that American centric of a, an organization. Um, and so they, they had to try to like resist censorship in Russia, in Turkey, in like a lot of countries all over the world.

13:17And interestingly, like one of the biggest threats to the Wikimedia Foundation right now is coming from the United States. And there's been a lot of discussions at the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the foundation that runs Wikipedia and its related projects, as to where they should be holding conventions and things like that now. They do them internationally, but there's been discussion about moving some of them outside of the United States because, one, a lot of people who want to come to them can't get visas. there's talk about like should it be backed up elsewhere like that sort of thing just because republicans in particular have turned their sights on it so the the background to it is for many years like rich and powerful people have not liked how they are portrayed on wikipedia there's an entire industry of something called paid editing where it's like reputation management companies try to edit Wikipedia pages to make them more palatable to rich and powerful people.

14:25This is extremely against the rules of Wikipedia. So for years, there's been this idea of reputation management on Wikipedia. It's extremely against the rules to pay someone to edit or to just edit your own page. There was this account on Twitter before Musk ran it that was called Congress edits. So whenever an IP address from within Congress was caught editing Wikipedia, it would show what it was. And it was very often Congress people changing their own pages and things like that. And one of the big bulwarks against this is the fact that it is a group project and human beings are maintaining this.

15:07And there's a bit of a hierarchy to Wikipedia where if you're a really well-respected editor, you can quite often get your own way and that sort of thing. And so a lot of the people who edit Wikipedia, they're from all over the world, but a lot of them are based in Europe or they're based in Africa or they're based in Asia. And they're editing pages about the January 6th riots or the 2020 election and things like this. And it's like, they're not willing to bow down to the false narrative that the election was stolen or whatever. And so Wikipedia has become a target of Trump, of the administration, of people who are saying it has a liberal bias.

15:52It reflects reality, the reality that the election was not stolen and things like that. um it it's obviously reminiscent grokopedia of something i only just learned actually existed when i listened to you know our friends at remap and they mentioned something called conservopedia which i again never heard of launched in uh november 2006 and well i'm actually reading the wikipedia page about conservopedia and it just says it's an english language wiki-based online encyclopedia written from a self-described american conservative and fundamentalist christian point of view i mean it sounds like grokipedia is basically the same thing and that is ideologically driven not that it's necessarily exactly the same ideology but i mean it's not far off it's gonna be interesting how it um develops and grows over time i guess i was bring it up as well and I wanted to pull an article but for me Conservopedia is not loading is that true for you also?

17:03I couldn't get it to load so then I went to the Wikipedia of Conservopedia exactly yeah I mean do you remember that coming out? I don't I think I was too young I haven't heard of it until Rob Zachney mentioned it on the Remap podcast as well yeah I don't know did they hug it to death or did it go down? yeah I'm not sure all of Remap's listeners crushing conservopedia. It's just funny that there's also... Oh, okay. I mean, it's funny. There's been many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many attempts to make an alternative to Wikipedia. And often it is under these grounds of we need a conservative version of Wikipedia.

17:45It's often people who were Wikipedia editors for a long time who were getting a lot of their edits rejected because they were trying to insert like insane shit into specific articles and they're like i'm just gonna start my own one and then they do it and no one does it and no one goes there because in part there's this just incredible collaboration of wikipedia like why would you you're not going to be able to take millions of people from this like objectively very good and powerful thing and get them to do the exact same work somewhere else for your ideological project. Yeah. Sam, do you still have Conservopedia in front of you?

18:30I can't get to load. Yeah. Do you want to know what it is? Yeah, what are we looking at? It's a pretty bare-bones frame website but it says, I mean, there's a list of popular articles at Conservopedia. The top articles, there's a bunch, but there's Evidence for Christianity, Great Flood, The World Denial, American Civil War, Free Market, Tchaikovsky, Unplugged NFL, Anxiety is one of the top articles. Most anxiety can be the result of a misunderstanding or rejection of fundamental truth. I sought the Lord and He heard me and delivered me from all my fears. Psalm 34. Amen. Amen. Yeah. I was with him in the first half and then...

19:09Black hole, feminism. It's just like a bunch of stuff. And then there's a list of in the news what MSM isn't fully covering. ireland elects anti-eu warmongering anti-nato expansion president setback for worst college majors uh steven smith trump is coming for black sports organizations etc etc etc um i find it funny that there's often you know the idea that silicon valley is they think they're making something new but it's like oh yeah you know we did the boring tunnel and it's everybody can get in there is like dude you just made a bus or whatever and like they can't even make a new right-leaning wikipedia because conservapedia already did that like 20 years ago you can work for prims terbopedia there is a job listing fill out an application what's the job i think it's not paid oh okay well why would you like to join and then there's an empty field additional comments optional well neither that's it neither is wikipedia of course but that brings me to the final thing i just want to ask jason which is that look the actual point of your piece is explaining that crockipedia is the antithesis of everything that makes wikipedia you know good and reliable and important i mean just i'm sure everybody knows but what do you mean by that it's the collaborative nature you were talking about like what is it yeah i mean i i've said this before on the podcast, but I think that this is the biggest group project in the history of humankind, like global project.

20:45It's, you know, a nonprofit organization. It's incredibly international. It's for the most part, very posi vibes. And it's proven itself to be like incredibly resistant to these efforts to attack Wikipedia. Because it has all these like rules and norms and guidelines that are... They have been set up over the course of literally just many, many years and probably the most annoying meetings of all time. If you go to the talk page for any article, you'll see people just talking about how to word something or does this article actually belong here or they'll discuss should a comma actually go here and that sort of thing.

21:32And that is like, pedantic and annoying probably for a lot of people, but it also makes Wikipedia Wikipedia, like it makes it this incredibly human thing. And Emmanuel has done a lot of reporting about how Wikipedia has been pretty good at resisting AI, for example. And that's partially because you have the collective labor efforts of all of these people who care very deeply about this thing, who are volunteering to do it and they don't want to see it taken over by AI. And so what Grokipedia is, is this extremely low effort. It's not even a competitor to it. I said that in the article because it's just so half-assed.

22:17It's like you told an AI to go scrape a bunch of shit and this is what we turned up with. Yeah, it doesn't seem that. Grokipedia is, as you say, particularly high effort at all. It's sort of just churning out and pulling out on the internet. Well, we'll see how it develops. We'll leave that there. And after the break, we're going to talk about the end of Windows 10 and the environmental impact that's going to have, but then a bunch of other stuff as well. We'll be right back after this.

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26:35All right, and we are back. Jason wrote this one, but I want to ask Emmanuel and Sam something first. The headline is, The End of Windows 10 Supporters, an e-waste disaster in the making. Emmanuel, can you explain how you're updating your PC at the moment? What does that involve for you? Yeah, I'm a lifelong loyalist to Windows. And as anyone who uses Windows knows, over the past, it's probably like three years, two years now, Microsoft has been pushing people increasingly more aggressively to Windows 11 from Windows 10. And I think last week was the last security update, which, again, as a lifelong Windows user, this is the most aggressive transition that I think I've seen the company make.

27:32I think it's still the most used operating system in the world. I think there are still machines out there running 95 and 98 and 2000. Yeah, my gaming PC. But it's like ATMs and I don't know, probably whatever manages our nuclear defense and stuff like that. But because it's so widely used, there's probably decades of support after they move on to the next operating system. As a user, I never felt so aggressively pushed to like, you need to get the new one. And And I honestly wouldn't, but my computer started crashing. So I went to update Windows. And the first thing I see is that my computer is not like...

28:16I forget what the term... I didn't meet system requirements is what it says. Which as a gamer, what you hear is like, your computer is not good enough for Windows 11, which is ridiculous. But that's obviously an error, right? Well, it's not an error. the thing is that you have to... Windows 11 only works with TPM 2.0. TPM stands for Trusted Platform Module. It's basically... I think the way it works is it's a chip on the motherboard that handles some cryptographic keys so it can do things more secure on a kernel level. And I had to update my motherboard so I could run that. and then that means updating the bios and then I could update Windows so I can update my GPU driver so I can play Battlefield 6 confidently without crashing.

29:13But I'm still crashing. So it was all for naught. I shouldn't have updated. But I guess it's good because now I get the security updates. Sam, are you going through this as well as a fellow PC user? I mean, going through it is not really the word for it. It's more that I've been getting pop-ups from windows for about a year saying you need to upgrade to 11 um and then i hit ignore and it keeps getting more and more aggressive and i keep hitting ignore and telling it to fuck off forever and it finally got me like i just i didn't want to have like a an unupdated pc because you've done yeah it's yeah it's done um the deed is done very sadly it's fine it's totally the same it's you it's like not a big deal dude our start menu is in the middle well you can move that i moved mine but yeah when i saw that i was like fuck this i was like flip the table but um that's the only difference that i can notice so whatever that's why um so i legit have not used windows since windows 98 i'm not even joking and i used to use it a lot so i'm very out of the loop but what i do understand is that some i mean a lot of people are very protective of windows 10 right like people love windows 10 for some reason and they like why why is that why are people so attached to it it works it's a good os man it's a good os it works it does what you want it to do it doesn't crash uh yeah it's a super stable it's a super stable os probably the most stable that i've ever used.

30:53I would say that every iteration gets more stable, but that's not true. There are notoriously bad ones like Vista or whatever. I think that you're baiting Linux users right now. Well, by saying this is the most secure. If you use Linux or Unix, please email Emmanuel. Talk to Emmanuel. He'd love to hear from you. He would love to hear from you. I mean, since you bring it up, And I feel I've made this joke a couple of times, like in Slack and stuff, but I feel like Jason is so close to becoming a Linux user, like so close, because based on this article, and, you know, the environmental impact of Windows 10, etc.

31:36I feel like you're getting so have you have you done it before, Jason? I downloaded Ubuntu on an old laptop one time, and I used it for a few minutes. And then I couldn't find a driver for something that I needed that I'm sure I could have figured out. but I like a board admission immediately. I do think that Linux is probably incredibly usable. That's not the type of thing that I'm into. That's not the type of frustration that I want to deal with. I want to deal primarily with hardware-based frustrations versus software-based ones. Yeah, you want new tech or new interesting gear or repairing old interesting gear.

32:16you don't want to be in the command line going, why the fuck is it not updating my packages? Or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Which, I mean, maybe that's an outdated view of the usability of Linux. No, it's pretty on point, I would say. I mean, I used Linux, well, because I couldn't afford a Mac. A Mac was too expensive when I was freelancing. I used like a used think pads for like 200 or 300 pounds or something I remember I actually brought it to the office once when I was using cubes on it like a secure operating system and I think I showed it to a manual or Jason the other way around but one of you then called the other one over like come check this out come look at Joseph's stupid laptop because it was like a a big brick with those red little mouse pads in the middle, like in the keyboard.

33:15I love that thing. But... It became too much pain in the ass and I moved to Mac. I think we were all sitting here trying to think of the word for the little red thing. What is it called? Clitoris. That's the only thing that I can see. A nipple. Yeah. No, there's a word. It's called the red dot. The thing... Is that what it's called? The track point. Oh, yes. There might be something like that. So the reason I went down that little Linux rabbit hole. Wikipedia calls it a pointing stick. What does Grokipedia call it? I know. I've got to look it up. Conservapedia is not fucking touching that. They don't want anything to do with it.