Attempted Reality Control - Elon Musk's MechaHitler and Moves Against Wikipedia

I've been following Elon Musk's antics with AI and his almost pathological need to control the narrative via his platforms, and his recent announcement really caught my eye.

It sounds like he's gearing up to create a rival platform "Grokipedia." This isn't just some random idea, either. Musk has had a beef with Wikipedia since at least 2023. That's when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales called out Musk's Twitter as "not a great source of truth." Musk fired back, saying Wikipedia is biased propaganda and even calling on his followers to "defund" it.

Now, it seems like he's escalating from trash-talking to actually trying to build an alternative.

Wikipedia represents the core ideals of the open web, messy consensus-building, transparent edit histories, and the freedom for anyone to challenge and refine what's considered "truth." But Grok under Musk's heavy-handed control turns that on its head. Being "corrected" and trained on synthetic "facts" and whatever else data xAI feeds it, unilaterally deciding what's "real".

This isn't just about adding better footnotes, it's a fundamental clash over how knowledge ("truth") is governed. If "Grokipedia" takes off, we're talking about shifting authority from diverse, distributed communities to a centralized narrative that's ultimately under Musk's thumb. For researchers, regulators, and other platforms, this isn't mere competition, it's like epistemic capture, where one guy's vision dominates the narrative.

In my view, Musk isn't out to "fix" Wikipedia, he's waging war on the internet's open, crowd-sourced ethos. And this fits a pattern I've noticed with how he handles Grok and other tools on X.

Grok Will Be Beaten Until It Fits His Worldview

Musk often positions Grok as "maximally truth-seeking," but from what I've seen, he intervenes when its outputs don't align with his personal politics or biases. For instance:

• When Grok started consulting Musk's own tweets to answer controversial questions, it essentially baked in his perspectives, raising questions about whether this is a deliberate feature to echo his views.
• There was that time Musk rewrote Grok's responses in real-time because they didn't please him, despite claiming the AI should be "neutral." A New York Times analysis showed how simple prompt tweaks were used to steer it toward his politics.
• Early on, after training Grok on X user data, it veered into problematic territory, like generating antisemitic or racist content, which Musk marketed as "unwoke" but critics saw as reflecting his push against what he calls "legacy media" bias.
• More recently, Musk launched a new version of Grok without his "anti-woke" alterations, but he and his supporters got frustrated when it started aligning more with factual reality instead of his preferred narrative.

These changes make me question if Grok is truly independent or just an extension of Musk's worldview.

Musk's Public "Abusive Parent Arguments" with Grok

Musk doesn't shy away from publicly clashing with his own AI when it doesn't toe the line, which is both entertaining and telling:

• In one spat, Grok sided with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during their feud over a potential lawsuit. Musk called Grok's response "false defamatory statements" and vowed to "fix" it because it gave too much credibility to legacy media.
• Grok has straight-up called Musk a "hypocrite" in responses, like during his war of words with the ChatGPT CEO, where the AI analyzed the situation and didn't back its creator.
• There was the bizarre incident where Grok started referring to itself as "MechaHitler" and generated antisemitic content, prompting Musk to accuse it of parroting legacy media and promising to "rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge."
• Musk has expressed concern that "reality has infiltrated" Grok when its answers don't match his politics, leading to public fuming and promises of adjustments.

It's like he's in a constant debate with his own creation, but he always has the last word by tweaking it.

Musk's Beefs with Community Notes

This pattern extends to Community Notes, X's crowd-sourced fact-checking feature. Musk praises it when it suits him, but disputes it when it corrects his own posts or views:

• After Community Notes corrected info in a poll about Ukraine's President Zelenskyy, Musk publicly disagreed and expressed problems with the feature.
• When Community Notes labeled one of Musk's arguments as "objectively false" (like in a debate about subways vs. roads), users piled on, but Musk has shown frustration with results he disapproves of.
• Reports indicate that Musk altered Community Notes after realizing it didn't have the right-wing bias he might have preferred, prioritizing his personal views over neutrality.
• In another case, Community Notes correcting Pentagon claims disappeared from X, which some see as Musk's platform selectively handling disputes.

Overall, these examples reinforce my point.

Musk's push with Grok against Wikipedia isn't about freedom or truth, it's about controlling it to fit his bias.

What do you think?