Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger said he is “happy” Elon Musk is creating a competitor to the online encyclopedia, but also expressed concern that the new artificial intelligence-driven platform could be inherently biased. In an interview with Straight Arrow News, Sanger shared insight into how he thinks Musk and the xAI team should build the platform to avoid such pitfalls.
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“The more encyclopedias in the world there are, the happier I am,” Sanger told SAN. “I do worry, however, that Grokpedia, or whatever it’s going to be called, will reflect the same sort of biases that Wikipedia has, and that, in fact, the Grok chatbot [large language model] has reflected.”
Musk announced his company, xAI, is building Grokipedia on Tuesday, Sept. 30.
Grok is an AI model and chatbot that was launched in November 2023. It can reason, generate code, conduct real-time searches and scan the X social media platform to explain current events and answer questions.
Sanger said shortly after Grok was released, it became left-leaning. He said over the last six months in particular, its answers to questions about politics and culture war issues are written from a left-wing perspective.
“It’s pretty annoying, unless you actually support that,” Sanger said.
Sanger explained that prompts written into AI chatbots are “wrapped” by what he describes as a background prompt before being submitted to the system to generate a response. The “wrapping” for the original prompt can be edited to ensure it gives a neutral and accurate response.
Sanger told SAN that xAI’s current system leads to a biased result — likely because of the background prompt.
“They have to know that the system as it exists now has the sort of biased result, and therefore, I think they must intend it,” Sanger said. “And if they intend it, that means that they’re probably going to come up with a similarly biased encyclopedia.”
“I hope I’m wrong, but this is what I suspect,” Sanger told SAN.
Sanger also told SAN that he had anticipated for a couple of years that AI would be used for encyclopedias and that he had even used it himself.
“I know it can be done and it can be done reasonably well,” Sanger told SAN.
Sanger spoke with Straight Arrow News to discuss his nine-point plan to improve Wikipedia. He said the online encyclopedia he co-founded has a left bias and a blacklist of conservative outlets that he believes negatively impacts the information available on the site. For instance, based on the site’s rules, Fox News is considered unreliable and mostly unusable, while MSNBC is reliable.
Sanger described Wikipedia’s current culture as an echo chamber.
“Consider joining Wikipedia at some point in the next few months and making your voice heard there. You do have a right to edit there,” Sanger said. “I think Wikipedia needs fresh blood from a wide variety of ideological and religious and other perspectives, national perspectives.”
Sanger is hoping that Wikipedia’s current leadership will implement his nine-point plan to return it to its founding goal of being neutral.
