One week ago, Elon Musk took a break from his busy schedule of defunding pediatric cancer research and paying other people to play video games for him to launch Grokipedia, an LLM-generated and LLM-edited online encyclopedia explicitly designed as a competitor to Wikipedia. Musk’s rationale for launching this tool is based on his perception that Wikipedia is suffused with left-wing propaganda, using his trademark cutting wit to dub it “Wokepedia.” Naturally, this feeds into the broader ideological project of the culture-war right to protect what they see as the cultural heritage of the “West.” On paper, protecting cultural heritage appeals to me immensely; I love classical music, and have been horrified in recent years to see it attacked and defunded by right-wing governments both in my native United Kingdom and Musk’s adopted home of the United States. I eagerly hopped onto Grokipedia to learn how it conceptualizes my favorite music in the world.
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