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Elon Musk’s AI-generated Wikipedia-style project, ‘Grokipedia’, has cursed the internet with its presence and, unsurprisingly, its entry on trans people is an absolute mess. The South-African billionaire’s tech startup, xAI, launched the online encyclopedia, named after the company’s AI-model Grok, on Monday (27 October) pushed as an alternative to the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia. The project was delayed last week after Musk claimed the team needed “to do more work to purge out the propaganda,” according to WIRED, who reported problems in accessing Grokipedia on its launch day. The website, complete with Musk’s patented ‘edgy’ black and white theme, boasts over 885,000 entries in just three days – a feat that took Wikipedia over half-a-decade to reach. The only problem is that Grokipedia’s AI-generated word vomit is about as reliable as a wet paper straw. According to tech analysts, who have spent the last few days perusing the site, most pages appear almost identical to their Wikipedia counterparts. However, many entries reportedly pushed highly conservative viewpoints or were highly inaccurate. WIRED reported that its entry on the US slave trade included a section attempting to justify slavery, while another claimed the 1619 Project – an initiative which aims to make explicit how slavery is the foundation on which the US was built – incorrectly framed “slaveryy as the central engine of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural development. Unsurprisingly, Grokipedia’s entries on LGBTQ+ subjects are similarly framed through a right-wing lense, misattribute theory as fact, and, in some cases, spread outright misinformation. Despite the already prevelant teething problems, Musk claims Grokipedia will “exceed Wikipedia by several order of magnitude in breadth, depth, and accuracy.” Grokipedia’s ‘transgender’ entry is transphobic in less than 13 words Upon loading its ‘Transgender’ entry, Grokipedia’s AI-generated spiel uses anti-trans dogwhistle ‘biological sex’ before the first sentence is even done, claiming that trans people are individuals whose “self-perceived gender identity conflicts with their biological sex.” In its second paragraph the page misuses statistics from the Williams Institute to claim there has been a sudden boom in “trans identification” since the 2010s, which it argues has declined due to “shifts in social trends” – a claim it justifies by citing a Fox News article citing an unverified and widely debunked graph pushed by conservative professor Eric Kaufmann. It then, wildly, pushes “social contagion” theories, including the debunked theory that “expanded access to social media” is responsible for young people coming out as trans. If that wasn’t enough of a gut-punch, the second paragraph finishes by claiming that trans people have reported “co-occurring conditions such as autism spectrum traits, depression, and anxiety at elevated rates.” Its source for this? The Cass Report – the UK’s highly controversial review of trans youth healthcare that contained little input from trans people themselves. Its introduction finishes with highly medicalised language framing trans identities as a medical condition which can be ‘treated’ with hormones and gender-affirming surgeries, before deep-diving into transphobic conspiracies, which it dubs “controversies,” including the false claim that trans people pose a threat to women and girls. Grokipedia posits being trans is a choice The article contains so much misinformation that it’s difficult to note everything. One of the most shocking categories is on the so-called “theories of causation.” Split into three sub-category, the section begins by outlandishly claiming that trans people exist because of mental health issues rather than what it calls an “immutable mismatch between biological sex and identity.” Citing a single study from 2018 named Psychiatric characteristics in transsexual individuals, it claims that conditions such as boderline personality disorder (BPD) or traumatic episodes can “manifest as a desire to alter one’s sexed body or social role,” all the while suddenly switching from using the term transgender to the term transsexual. The second sub-category on “social influence and contagion hypothses” uses a single study – Lisa Littman’s discredted research into so-called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) – to claim that trans identities are “contagious.” The only other source it cites is a Daily Mail article on Littman’s study. Littman’s resarch into ROGD was so widely criticised that Littman herself was forced to issue a corrective statement, noting that it should not be used as a formal diagnosis. Subsequent research has proved ‘social contagion’ theory to be nonsense. Its final sub-category on “critiques of innate gender identity models” is a laundry list of discredited claims that being trans is a choice. Grokipedia again cites the Cass Report, which it says “found no solid biological underpinnings for gender dysphoria in youth.” It has no categories on the fact (yes, it is a fact) that trans people’s identities are immutable. Grokipedia rewrites trans and LGBTQ+ history In its section on “societal and cultural dimensions,” Grokipedia essentially rewrites LGBTQ+ history by suggesting that trans people didn’t exist in queer movements prior to the 1990s. A sub-section on its “integration with LGBTQ+ movements” immediately pushes lies by claiming that “transgender activism became formally integrated into broader lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) movements during the late 20th century.” There was no so-called ‘formal integration’ into lesbian and gay activist movements, nor was there some pseudo ceremonial introduction of trans people to the LGBTQ+ community as Grokipedia claims – trans people have always existed. Much of Grokipedia’s analysis on historical accounts of transgender people is either sparse or misconstrues the existence of trans people with the existence of research on the trans community. It claims that Magnus Hirchfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, founded in 1919, served as a hallmark moment where trans people suddenly burst into existence. It bizarrely frames Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as figureheads of the community who “joined gay bar patrons in resisting police raids” rather than spearheading the pivotal Stonewall Riots of 1969. Both activists were heavily involved in campaigning before and after the riots. Its analysis of trans rights from the 2010s onwards is almost exclusively framed from the perspective of TERF activism and cites several anti-trans groups, including the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), which has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Its analysis, once again, delves into widely discredited ‘social contagion’ theories as though they were an immutable, historical fact.
