By Atanu Biswas
In the 35th poem of his Nobel Prize-winning Gitanjali, Tagore expressed his desire for a world “where knowledge is free”. Given that “free” and “freedom” go hand in hand, let’s examine how Wikipedia’s quarter-of-a-century-old “free” online knowledge base is being challenged in today’s AI era.
The initial driving force of Wikipedia, certainly, was a personal crisis. After being born on December 26, 2000, Kira, the daughter of American Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, suffered from a life-threatening condition known as meconium aspiration syndrome. The hospital in San Diego offered an experimental treatment. A desperate Wales was searching the internet for info on that. However, he only received information from unverifiable sources. Scholarly publications did exist, of course, but they were typically incomprehensible to the common people. So Wales and his spouse relied heavily on the doctors, and fortunately, their daughter survived.
However, the helplessness of lacking trustworthy information during those awful times motivated Wales to establish an online storehouse of information that would be free, accurate, complete, ubiquitous, and, crucially, accessible to billions of people. The idea for such a free encyclopaedia was already in his mind.
However, it now got a special shape and drive. In January 2001, Wales co-founded Wikipedia. It doesn’t require an “Open sesame” command, unlike Alibaba’s treasure trove, we know. And it has grown over the past 25 years into a credible, massive repository that offers everyone free access to the entirety of human knowledge, with roughly seven million topics already covered.
Wikipedia’s primary source of funding is donations rather than advertising. Many individuals initially believed that Wikipedia would not last long. In contrast, this worldwide experiment of sharing knowledge online has become an integral part of contemporary living. Today, English-language Wikipedia is viewed 11 billion times a month.
Many labelled Jimmy Wales a “communist” for founding Wikipedia as a nonprofit. He is also regarded by many as the last “decent tech baron”. However, long before it became the world’s largest collection of knowledge in history, Wikipedia had to overcome its main obstacle—getting strangers on the Internet to communicate and work together. The strangers needed to have faith in one another.
According to Wales, “trust” is a valuable and living entity that needs to be fostered. His recent book, The Seven Rules of Trust, which outlines the fundamental ideas behind transforming the website, was just released on October 28. Interestingly, billionaire Elon Musk unveiled “Grokipedia”, an AI-powered substitute for Wikipedia, just a day before on October 27.
Today, the number of individuals resorting to ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI tools for information may be increasing as AI quickly permeates our lifestyles. Thus, AI may be hindering Wikipedia’s usage or popularity to some extent. Also, Musk was up against Wikipedia for quite some time. He has called Wikipedia “Wokipedia” and argued that it contains left-wing, biased, and “woke” content.
According to Musk, Grokipedia is an answer to Wikipedia’s “political and ideological bias”. David Sacks, the Trump administration’s AI and cryptocurrency czar, proposed the concept of Grokipedia. And Grokipedia is claimed to be far superior to Wikipedia and an essential step towards Musk’s company xAI’s objective of comprehending the universe.
As the name “Grokipedia” suggests, its information is validated by xAI’s chatbot “Grok”. Despite their pledge to present objective facts, criticisms that it supports Musk’s right-wing beliefs have already started to surface. For instance, the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, is attributed to “widespread claims of voting irregularities”, a theory advanced by Donald Trump and his supporters to undermine Joe Biden’s 2020 triumph. According to TIME, one wouldn’t know about Musk’s Nazi salute during Trump’s second inauguration by looking him up on Grokipedia. The first version of Wikipedia (v0.1) came up with around 885,000 entries—still much smaller than Wikipedia. However, the primary distinction is not in its size but rather in its underlying philosophy.
The foundation of Wikipedia is human cooperation and voluntarism. Its pages are edited and reviewed by thousands of volunteers worldwide using the neutrality and citation guidelines. On the other hand, Grokipedia, a mark of Musk’s campaign against “human bias”, is powered by AI. Although they promise swiftness and objectivity, the AI-generated summaries and AI-validated sources leave little opportunity for clarification or debate. Also, a large number of Grokipedia articles claim to have been derived from Wikipedia.
Shades of uncertainty still exist. “AI biases” are well-known, and they are frequently results of the operating programmes and the underlying training data. For instance, AI draws a Black George Washington or uses slang. At the same time, there are numerous unsettling instances of “hallucinations” of AI; that is where AI presents a bouquet of manufactured information—those are non-existent facts. Accordingly, the information provided by the AI-built encyclopaedia will often be questioned.
However, the emergence of Grokipedia as a substitute was not taken lightly by Wikipedia. They see it as an existential conflict against the machine and also against the richest individual on the planet. Within hours of Grokipedia’s arrival, Wikipedia posted a banner on its homepage, “Created by people, not machines. Owned by a non-profit, not a billionaire”, a calm but clear reaction.
Today, 25 years of “free” knowledge is facing tough obstacles. Grokipedia is an experiment that questions who should be responsible for online truth, as Musk directly challenged the world of human-edited Wikipedia. Will an AI-powered Grokipedia someday replace Wikipedia? Can AI be relied upon to write the truth more than humans? Furthermore, what happens if Grokipedia turns into a paid service after Wikipedia loses the war? The answers remain unclear. However, they are crucial to humanity.
The writer is a professor of statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata
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