Weekly Scroll: Grokiganda

Plus! Mamdani, AI psychosis, Russia's Big brother app, and more

Welcome to the Weekly Scroll. This edition is larger than usual, and we’re talking about all sorts of things: Zohran’s win, AI psychosis, Russia’s new Big Brother super-app, the Hawk Tuah Girl, news outlets falling for AI slop election videos, Substack drama, Elon’s new Wikipedia competitor, and much more.

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Grokipedia Runs Wild

Last week Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a new online encyclopedia which Musk claims will be a less biased alternative to Wikipedia. The site is powered by xAI’s Grok model, as opposed to Wikipedia’s ecosystem of human editors with their labyrinth of rules, procedures, and regulations.

Predictably, Grokipedia articles (when they aren’t literally copy-pasted from Wikipedia) appear to be significantly more right-wing than Wikipedia articles. Consider the opening paragraphs of the article on the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. Wikipedia says:

Within 36 hours, five people died: one was shot by the Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three died of natural causes, including a police officer who died of a stroke a day after being assaulted by rioters and collapsing at the Capitol.

While Grokipedia instead makes the weasel claim:

no deaths were directly caused by rioters against police or officials on the day.

Correct, no deaths were directly caused by rioters “on the day”, because the police officer the rioters assaulted died on January 7th instead of the 6th. Grokipedia also notes in its opening paragraph that the protests were motivated by “widespread claims of voting irregularities”, emphasizes that “most participants carried no firearms and the incursion was cleared within hours” and claims that “mainstream accounts often amplify casualty figures and intent beyond forensic evidence while downplaying antecedent failures in election oversight and riot containment”.

Nothing in the opening paragraphs is factually incorrect. But Grokipedia is designed to do what Musk believes Wikipedia is doing - presenting the facts in a biased, partisan way. It’s very easy to omit certain facts, selectively present evidence, and push a narrative that leads readers towards a conclusion that isn’t actually supported by the overall evidence.

The site also glazes the hell out of Elon and all his companies - the very neutral, unbiased site says “[Musk’s] long-term vision prioritizes safeguarding human consciousness against existential threats, emphasizing the establishment of a self-sustaining multi-planetary civilization as a hedge against planetary-scale catastrophes on Earth,”. I guess if you own the encyclopedia you get to have a little AI sycophancy as a treat.

It’s yet another example of conservatives trying to undermine traditional media institutions and replace them with explicitly right-wing alternatives.

Russia’s Big Brother App

Big Brother exists, and he’s spreading his influence to Russia.