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.
Archive: http://archive.today/aEcz0
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.
Most of the world’s wealth is wasted under capitalism.
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.
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.
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.
The word Führer is 99% used for Hitler. There are many variants that are OK to use though. Most notably Anführer (if Führer is leader, Anführer would be “the one who leads ahead”) which is the common word to use for leader. Others are composites like Bergführer (mountain guide).
The swastica also existed before the nazis but is now forever tainted.
What about someone who drives a car? Many Germans have a Führerschein in their wallet. It’s just a normal-ass word.
You can read right?
Führer = Hitler
Something-Führer / Führer-Something = not Hitler
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.
do you know that you can an edglord doing nazi shit? a nazi. no matter the motivation, he’s still a nazi.
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.
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.
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.
But Elon is not a nazi! All he did was give out his heart to the crowd in a roman salut!
You’re not going to complain about a heartfelt roman salut, are you? That would be woke!
It will be cited as a valid source for presentations at schools around the world lol
“Grok, is this true?”
Do not get the point here. He did in fact and historically used that name. So we are deleting history now because we are not supposed like Hitler or Elon?
Stalin was a mass murderer, so was Mao, yet they also went by some nicer names. No one has ever raised a serious issue about that.
I do not think anyone here is denying that Hitler was a National Socialist.
Slow news day, I guess.
What’s the difference between this garbage and Conservapedia?
Conservapedia is worse, remarkably.
Not that remarkable, Grokipedia is largely plagiarized from Wikipedia whereas Conservapedia is fully hand-written by a bunch of idiots.
Man calls unbiased site biased, releases biased site to replace unbiased site.
I mean it is biased, just not biased enough for Musk.
Or biased in the right direction
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
Everything that fascist touches becomes corrupted and useless
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?
I mean the whole stupid Grokipedia thing is a shit show that will never take off, but Fuhrer is just “leader” in German. In it’s used context for Hitler it straight up means dictator and (iirc) only came into full on use after the plebiscite giving him full dictatorial power after Hindenburg’s death in 1934 (edit: He was already the Reich’s Chancellor and merged in Hindenburg’s powers with the vote to make himself full dictator / Fuhrer).
I’d welcome input from a German national - Is the word still used there?
Führer is not just „leader“, it is tainted and using it as a substitute for Hitler in a factual text is super weird, like casually calling Jesus in his Wikipedia article „our lord and savior“ now and then.
Thanks for reminding me to leave a donation on Wikipedia, seriously if we lose Wikipedia we are fucked.
… 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
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.
so you’re judging their costs and balances based on ten year old data? and acting like times haven’t changed enormously in that decade?
I know the amount of bandwidth AI’s are using to scrape wikipedia is itself an onus:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/wikipedia-contributors-are-worried-about-ai-scraping.html
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.
cool, you do you. don’t donate and continue to use it like a parasite lol
I prefer the term “commensalist”
