Like many journalists, I have alerts set up on major search engines watching for any mention of my name on the Internet—to keep track of who might be trying to sue me or have me fed to sharks at any particular moment. A system that used to work better when search engines were still just search engines and hadn’t yet been completely screwed up by the grafting of so-called “AI” to them by grifter tech lords in search of ever larger percentages of Earth’s entire economic output … but now work occasionally and almost at random.
Since “AI” services don’t just steal from every creator on the planet but also steal from each other in an endless quest for new information to “slice, dice, and julienne to perfection,” I was unsurprised to find that reactionary billionaire Elon Musk’s new “AI”-generated imitation encyclopedia Grokipedia had cobbled together a biographical entry on me and inflicted it upon the world.
The entry in question is exactly what you would expect structurally: replete with facts, some of which are accurate, strung together in a meandering, recursive narrative, replete with major blind spots. What surprised me was that even though both Musk’s Grok “AI” chatbot and the related Grokipedia bots have been trained to line up with Musk’s right-wing political bias du jour, the entry on me was pretty fair to my socialist political views. Perhaps because I’ve spent a lot of my career criticizing Democrats from the left, I don’t know.
The main exception to that evenhandedness being where the bots go off their “encyclopedia” script to generate criticism of my work that has never been leveled at me by any human in public to my knowledge. Criticism reminding me of nothing so much as when I was once interviewed about the crisis in local news by the producers of a talk show on Boston NPR-affiliate WBUR—and they refused to make me a guest, but instead ran a couple of clips of my recorded comments and let the people allowed to be guests debate with me in my absence.
Recently it’s become possible to suggest edits to Grokipedia bots for review by, yes, the Grokipedia bots … no humans involved.
But I refuse to voluntarily give any information to any so-called “AI” platform, Elon Musk’s latest project aimed at trolling Wikipedia for being “woke” least of all. Because I’m firmly in the critical camp that says so-called “AI” is not AI. It is not artificial intelligence. It is not anything that anyone outside the tech giants producing the suite of extremely flawed digital tools currently taking the US and world economies to the precipice of a massive financial collapse (and their swiftly declining ranks of fan nerds) ever asked to be inflicted on us the way it has been.
So I’m not touching the Grokipedia entry on me. I’m not going to try to help such a tech abomination because by doing so I will be complicit with its makers, Musk foremost among them. I’m not linking to it from this column. And I’m certainly not using any tool that’s produced solely by unthinking bots of any description.
When it comes to digital alternatives to traditional encyclopedias I will stick with Wikipedia. Which is itself kind of a hot mess in some regards. But at least it’s largely a human-produced and human-run mess. And though it uses various kinds of bots itself, at least it doesn’t pretend they are incipient AI machine gods of the type now in the service of sociopaths like Musk, who eager to make the rest of humanity irrelevant … and doubtless expendable.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
