Elon Musk’s AI-generated Wikipedia-like project, Grokipedia, has cursed the internet with its existence, and unsurprisingly, its entry on transgender people is a total mess.
South African billionaire technology startup xAI on Monday (October 27) launched an online encyclopedia named after its AI model Grok as an alternative to crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia.
According to “WIRED”, users reported that there were problems accessing Grokipedia on its launch day.
Featuring Musk’s patented “edgy” black and white theme, the website boasts more than 885,000 entries in just three days, a feat that took Wikipedia more than five years to reach. The only problem is that Grokipedia’s AI-generated word vomit is about as reliable as a wet paper straw.
According to a technical analyst who has perused the site over the past few days, most pages look nearly identical to their Wikipedia counterparts. However, many entries push very conservative views or are reported to be highly inaccurate.
wired It reported that some accounts of the U.S. slave trade sought to justify slavery, while another article argued that the 1619 Project, an initiative aimed at demonstrating that slavery was the foundation of the United States’ founding, “incorrectly frames slavery as a central engine of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural development.”
Unsurprisingly, Grokipedia entries on LGBTQ+ themes are similarly framed through a right-wing lens, mistaking theory for fact and, in some cases, spreading outright misinformation.
Despite the teething problems that are already prevalent, Musk claims that Glocipedia “exceeds Wikipedia in breadth, depth, and accuracy by orders of magnitude.”
Grokipedia’s “transgender” entry is less than 13 words and transphobic
Grokipedia’s AI-generated spiel uses the anti-transgender dog whistle “biological sex” before the first sentence ends when you load the “transgender” entry, claiming that transgender people are individuals whose “self-identified gender identity is inconsistent with their biological sex.”
The page’s second paragraph exploits statistics from the Williams Institute to claim that the sudden boom in “trans-identifying” since the 2010s has declined due to “changing societal trends,” and cites this claim to justify itself. fox news The article cites an untested and widely debunked graph promoted by conservative professor Eric Kaufman.
And it wildly promotes “social contagion” theories, including the debunked theory that “widening access to social media” is the cause of young people coming out as transgender. If this wasn’t shocking enough, the second paragraph ends by claiming that transgender people “report higher rates of co-occurring disorders such as autism spectrum traits, depression, and anxiety.”
What’s the source? The Cass Report – Britain’s highly controversial review of medical care for transgender young people, but it included very little input from transgender people themselves.
The preface concludes with highly medicalized language describing transgender identity as a medical condition that can be “cured” with hormones and gender-affirming surgery, before delving into the transphobic underbelly. The plot is labeled a “controversy,” including false claims that transgender people are a threat to women and girls.
Grokipedia claims being transgender is a choice
This article contains so much misinformation that it’s hard to note it all down. One of the most shocking categories concerns so-called “causal theories.”
This section is divided into three subcategories, starting with the outlandish claim that transgender people exist because of mental health issues rather than a so-called “discrepancy between biological sex and identity.”
Citing a single 2018 study named . Mental characteristics of transsexualsargues that symptoms such as borderline personality disorder (BPD) and traumatic episodes can “manifest as a desire to change one’s gendered body or social role,” during which there is a sudden switch from using the term transgender to the term transsexual.
The second subcategory, regarding the “Social Influence and Contagion Hypothesis,” uses a single study, Lisa Littman’s disingenuous study of so-called rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), to argue that transgender identity is “contagious.” The only other source the magazine cites is a Daily Mail article about Littman’s research.
Littman’s research on ROGD was so widely criticized that Littman himself was forced to issue a corrected statement stating that ROGD should not be used as an official diagnosis. Subsequent research has proven that the “social contagion” theory is nonsense.
The final subcategory regarding “critiques of the innate gender identity model” is a long list of discredited claims that being transgender is a choice. Grokipedia again cites the Cass report, stating that “no solid biological basis for gender dysphoria in young people was found.”
There are no categories for the fact that the identity of transgender people is immutable (yes, that’s a fact).
Grokipedia rewrites transgender and LGBTQ+ history
Grokipedia essentially rewrites LGBTQ+ history by suggesting in its section on “Social and Cultural Aspects” that transgender people did not exist in the queer movement before the 1990s.
Its subsection on “integration with the LGBTQ+ movement” immediately pushes the lie by claiming that “transgender activism was formally integrated into the broader lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) movement in the late 20th century.”
There was no so-called “formal integration” into lesbian and gay activist movements, nor was there a pseudo-ceremonial introduction of transgender people into the LGBTQ+ community as Grokipedia claims. Transgender people have always existed.
Much of Grokipedia’s analysis of historical accounts of transgender people is either lacking in content or confuses the existence of research on the trans community with the existence of transgender people. Magnus Hilchfeld’s Institute of Sexology, founded in 1919, claims to have been the signature moment for the sudden emergence of transgender people.
Oddly, it depicts Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as community representatives who “joined gay bar patrons in resisting police raids” rather than spearheading the pivotal Stonewall riots of 1969. Both activists were heavily involved in the campaign before and after the riots.
Its analysis of transgender rights since the 2010s is framed solely in terms of TERF activism and cites several anti-trans organizations, including the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), which has been deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The analysis once again delves into the widely discredited “social contagion” theory, as if it were an immutable historical fact.
Source: PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news – www.thepinknews.com
