Rockapedia puts a high-tech spin on an old-school idea.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Rockapedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched by Elon Musk's XAI last month, promises to be an ideological alternative to Wikipedia.

But the tool doesn't just have a different political flavor, argues Ryan McGrady, a senior fellow at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

He wrote recently for Tech Policy Press that Grogapedia takes a more top-down approach to knowledge, one that harks back to less democratized eras.

Wikipedia doesn't allow you to use press releases from a

company. It doesn't allow most uses of what someone says about themselves. On the other hand,

it is kind of interesting to have a summary of sources that includes what people say about

themselves. And in that way, Groghikipedia is an interesting experiment of what Wikipedia could do if we really wanted to.

I mean, Groghapedia is going to be way more satisfying to the people it covers and the companies it covers

because it's going to include what those people and companies say about themselves.

You write in your piece that neutrality for Wikipedia is less a perfect

state than a continuously negotiated process wherein disputes are expected and common. How does that

compare to what we know of the process behind Grogapedia's outputs? So if Wikipedia is a process of hundreds, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of

volunteers trying to negotiate the selection of sources, Groghupedia is, it's kind of a black box.

All that we know about it are what Elon Musk and other folks at XAI have said about it and what its articles say, and perhaps what GROC says about how it produces it.

And so from that, instead of a bunch of different human editors who are negotiating how to summarize sources, you have GROC that is prioritizing primary and self-published sources alongside the sources that Wikipedia considers.

And then you have intervention by Musk or by others at XAI to ensure that it aligns with a particular

ideological point of view.

With Wikipedia, whether you end up agreeing with the consensus reached at any one moment,

there is at least some transparency about how it was arrived at. that is a novel way to construct information, right?

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