In late October, Elon Musk released a Wikipedia alternative, with pages written by his AI chatbot Grok. Unlike its nearly quarter-century-old namesake, Musk said Grokipedia would strip out the “woke” from Wikipedia, which he previously described as an “extension of legacy media propaganda.” But while Musk’s Grokipedia, in his eyes, is propaganda-free, it seems to have a proclivity toward right-wing hagiography.
Take Grokipedia’s entry on Adolf Hitler. Until earlier this month, the entry read, “Adolf Hitler was the Austrian-born Führer of Germany from 1933 to 1945.” That phrase has been edited to “Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and dictator,” but Grok still refers to Hitler by his honorific one clause later, writing that Hitler served as “Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934 until his suicide in 1945.” NBC News also pointed out that the page on Hitler goes on for some 13,000 words before the first mention of the Holocaust.
Archive: http://archive.today/aEcz0
The man can literally afford to have a harem island, fund an entertainment company to create anything to amuse him, or solve world hunger…and he fawns over Hitler.
His wealth is truly wasted.
He enjoys the smell of his own farts and believes other people will as well.
Most of the world’s wealth is wasted under capitalism.
Apparently owning the libs, snorting ketamine to the point of pissing yourself and dick jokes are more important than anything you mentioned.
I mean the whole stupid Grokipedia thing is a shit show that will never take off, but Fuhrer is just “leader” in German. In it’s used context for Hitler it straight up means dictator and (iirc) only came into full on use after the plebiscite giving him full dictatorial power after Hindenburg’s death in 1934.
I’d welcome input from a German national - Is the word still used there?
Führer is not just „leader“, it is tainted and using it as a substitute for Hitler in a factual text is super weird, like casually calling Jesus in his Wikipedia article „our lord and savior“ now and then.
Thank you for this comparison. That’s a fun one and one that’s made a little more ‘subtle’ in the US if only because of how common that language is among the populace in regions and how pervasive protestantism is in advertising/messaging.
Jesus would’ve hated America. I think according to the bible he lost his shit twice - both because of capitalism.
There was one other time, when he cursed a tree because he didn’t like its fruit, but yeah in general he disliked the nascent forms of capitalism and money people that he encountered.
Yeah I fully agree with this. I am thick in the middle of “Third Reich Trilogy” which gives an enormous amount of context to the word though.
If they changed it, it’s further evidence of scummy behaviour, but on its own it’s not a huge red flag for me with historical context.
Can’t recommend the books enough if you’re into that. The lad must have spent half his life in primary sources.
Is the word still used there?
Leader would be “Anführer” these days. “Führer” was probably a perfectly neutral word before 1933. Now you just can’t use it anymore without alluding to that period. You can call your mountain guide “Bergführer”. All such derived terms are unaffected, but “Führer” is basically off limits for anything outside the Nazi Germany context.
In it’s used context for Hitler it straight up means dictator
From what I gather I don’t think the German people meant it like that (read: they weren’t supposed to). Of course he was the solitary head of state and everybody knew that his word was above any other’s, but addressing him as “my Leader” is much more about ideology than politics. The honorific would’ve probably been “my Chancellor” if it had been about his political authority. As “Führer” he was the figurative savior of the German people after the perceived injustices encapsulated in the WW1 armistice. And he did lead them back towards a sense of national pride that was completely shattered after 1918.
Being a political figure was just a means to an end for him. If he hadn’t been dismissed as a bad artist by a Jewish professor and if WW1 had taken a different course who knows what he would’ve ended up doing with his life. His weapon was his voice and that weapon was fueled by all these toxic convictions. If your hatred is aimed towards entire peoples and nations I guess your only shot at revenge is becoming a politician.
Is there another more ‘generic’ German term that would fit when talking about this period of time in retrospect? So you could have one line that says the German equivalent of ‘he was the leader in Germany during this time period, commonly referred to by the title Fuhrer’, and then no need to keep using “Fuhrer” anymore in the rest of the article.
Maybe Staatsoberhaupt
Pretty sure its usually “Diktator” in that context.
Not German but moved to Germany. The word is still a normal word, it can be used, only in certain contexts not.
To me it is very very weird.
Especially in a comboword there is 0,0 issue: Reiseführer, Bergführer, etc. The no go zone seems very subtle to me, it’s more about pronunciation and context, not the word itself. Especially the word “Führerschein” is super weird to me when used in regular conversations. I automatically hear translated “license to be the Führer”, but it just means driver’s license and nothing else and no one finds it weird.
Exactly this. If you use it as part of a compound word or as a verb it’s totally fine. However “der Führer” (the Führer) is exclusively used to describe Hitler, and it usually has a negative or ironic vibe depending on who says it.
About the Führerschein… führen and fahren have the same etymological root… It is still used in “Führen eines Fahrzeugs” which simply means “driving a car” and that is where the term comes from.
At least in Austria it is also used outside of compound words. E.g. when talking about the Bergführer, you still mean the compound word, but the word “Führer” alone is still used in this context extensively. But of course it all depends on context.
“Führerschein” is super weird to me when used in regular conversations. I automatically hear translated “license to be the Führer”
Not weird for point of view of polish speaker - we use same word “prowadzić” for driving a car, running a company or just leading someone to some destination. From that perspective concept of leading a country and “leading” a car is perfectly intuitive
Führer means driver also. So literally Driver’s license.
Why would they use the honorary, German word Fuhrer in an English language wiki article though?
Exactly.
If you are describing hitler’s role in WW2? Yes, he was The German Fuhrer.
I would say that, honestly, I prefer the second version as it is more accurate to what he was. But any time you change something you have to ask “what does it mean that we are changing things?”
And since musk is, at best, someone who wishes he was as cool as the losers on LUE back in the day? This is very much intentional.
We also use “Dalai Lama”, for example. Changing it to “leader” would lose a lot in translation. There’s a very long list of more problematic things with Musk and this ego project than this particular wording choice.
I agree with the second half but disagree on the first. We do use Dalai Lama because thats what he’s known as across the world (at least fron my understanding) . We didn’t refer to Angela Merkel as Furher of Germany when she lead it so it seems weird to include this in the introductory summary of Hitler especially considering it’s an English article. I dont think you’re losing anything in translation in this example by calling him the “leader of Germany” at that time. Down below, in the verbose write-up, seems like the more appropriate place to use it.
I don’t think the Merkel comparison is accurate - no one called her Leader, we called her the Chancellor (Kanzler), because that’s the job title. “Chancellor” is a pretty specific word in English with a narrower meaning and clearer connotation than “leader”, which can be used in a huge variety of contexts. The problem is that English doesn’t have a 1:1 translation of Fuehrer as we do with Kanzler, and “leader” is too generic versus Chancellor, Prime Minister, President, etc. Maybe “Supreme Leader” would work, but I haven’t seen that used often enough for it to stick.
Hitler was literally the chancellor of Germany. That was his official title before he seized power and took total control and changed the title himself.
I know, but convention is to use a person’s final and highest title. Nobody refers to Julius Caesar as “quaestor”.
It’s a title he invented though, after taking control. Continuing to use it is honoring his memory in a way.
As a german, the word is very seldom used, and everybody cringes on use of it alone. We even use the english word guide instead for situations where it fits.
Thanks so much. I thought that would be the case but I wondered around things like “team leader” or “band leader” or whatever.
My guess was that it was forever tainted so I appreciate the context.
Not a german national, but I’m learning it at school, and they say that if you go to a german-speaking region, it’s better to say “chef”, because “führer” is still connected to that guy
You don‘t really call him just the Führer in academic works so anything that works like an encyclopedia shouldn‘t either. The title is charged with either mockery or admiration. It should have no place in this context, because it should at least try to be neutral if you ask me.
I’m in the thick of a 90 hour audiobook trilogy on the third Reich which is absolutely incredible (link) and Fuhrer is used liberally, partly to describe his ascent to absolute dictator as opposed to just Reich’s Chancellor.
I’m not defending shitopedia for one second! I’m just not sure it’s as outrageous as other shit that’s taking up our limited attention span at the moment is all.
Only his followers actually use(d) that title for him, everyone else when using that word about him, would say it’s the title his followers call(ed) him. Like how wikipedia is using it. Grok is just using it as his title, like a follower would.
You can think of it kind of like “dear leader” in north korea. Anyone calling him that outside of north korea is at least doing it sarcastically or using air quotes. This would be like if the news called him that with a sincere reverent tone.
It’s true and terrifying.
We have a Nazi on his way to controlling a robot army.
Liberals make the mistake, both with Musk and Trump, of dismissing them as ignorant bumbling men when they are both extremely intelligent and do not act in an arbitrary manner. This is not Musk being weird after too much ketamine. This is an extraordinary engineer showing his allegiance to Hitler. It’s apparently too shocking for most people to accept.
It’s funny that they made a conservative Wikipedia (snowflake safe space much?) because those people don’t read shit.
Führer might only mean leader in Germany, but it’s rarely outside of refering to Hitler nowadays.
Leader, in modern German, would be translated as “Anführer”, mit “Führer” specifically because of the connotations. Also, using the term fuhrer in English, instead of translating as leader, clearly means it’s being used as a title, rather than a factual descriptor of what he was.
You can use Führer in context, but as it’s a title that was specifically created by and for Hitler, and never used before or since, it’s generally not used as a title for Titler, because people don’t want to give him the post mortem respect of addressing him by this title.
And for context, the entire German language Wikipedia entry of Hitler, calls Hitler Führer a total of 17 times. 8 of those are in direct quotes, 3 in indirect quotes, 2 of them are describing his official title, 2 use the literal meaning of “leader” in the context of the party, NOT his title as dictator, 2 of them are talking about how he saw himself, and one is drawing a linguistic analogous link between “Führer” and “Geführten” (Leader and Followers).
Outside of quotes, there is not a single use of the term “Der Führer” as an actual honorific title (“The Führer”) in the entire German language wiki page.
German here: you can use “Führer” only with specific other context. There could be for example “Gruppenführer” -> the leader of a group. Or “Anführer” -> could be the elder of a tribe. If you clearly use it in a neutral context, no problem.
But if you use it just like that, it will immediately raise concern if you really meant to say it this way.
Fuhrer is just “leader” in German.
Yeah, go to Germany and call any leader “Führer” and see how well that goes. Uh, maybe not in Eastern Germany where they’ll probably like it.
Man calls unbiased site biased, releases biased site to replace unbiased site.
It’s the only way to justify his stupidity and cover up his lack of genius.
I mean it is biased, just not biased enough for Musk.
It’s about as unbiased as any site could be.
I wonder how (or if) grokopedia defines “woke”?
Most of the people who complain about “the woke” arent able to define it.
Not sure if you heard but according to the CEO of Palantir in an interview he gave a few weeks ago, there is now “woke left” and “woke right.”
Basically anybody on the right who wakes up and smells the bullshit in the narrative is “woke.” Like if you believe in those “crazy conspiracy theories” that say Palantir is up to some evil villain shit, you’re woke.
It’s kind of hilarious that a word literally derived from “awoken” in pronunciation, spelling, and meaning is these people’s prime insult.
So is antifa. Literally anti-fascist.
Creepy ass conservatives: Stay asleep so I can keep doing stuff to you while you’re unaware.
Palantir is a scumbag company that profits on selling the machinery of oppression.
According to Peter Thiel Greta Thunberg is the Anti-Christ because she believes in people coming together and pressuring the UN. Anything to avoid accountability with these people.
When they rail against “one world government” it just makes me think it’s a good idea.
I mean they want a one government, they just want to be the ones in charge of that one government.
The entire argument is that it’s somehow safer bc it’s a private corporation/business, and not the government. Except it’s a private monopoly protected and contracted by the fucking government!
The only way that argument would possibly make the slightest bit of sense would be in a world where there was legitimate competition between other corporations and the American people were actually had some say in which private company got government contracts.
Instead, the government (who are allegedly the reason we have to turn to private businesses) is buying stock in private companies, and then handing government contracts to the fucking private companies where they own stock.
Isn’t the pope the new anti-christ?
Conservapedia already did this something like twenty years ago. It missed the entire purpose of the project, which was to invite a kaleidoscope of specialists and journalists to document the volume of known information categorically, primarily through citation to other online works.
Instead, you had a basket case of ultra-orthodox ideologues carving out a very niche set of contrary opinion posts that weren’t well documented or continuously maintained.
Conservapedia isn’t a right wing vanity project because of it’s hot takes on the President, it’s a vanity project because of the yawning gulfs in it’s data set. Nobody engages with the site, because it is so heavily censored.
I get the sense Grokapedia will suffer the same fate. If a subject doesn’t tickle Musk’s interest, it’ll either go undocumented or be a naked plagarization of some other online encyclopedia. And as soon as Musk loses interest entirely, support for the service will go the same way as so many private vanity projects.
Incidentally, Wikipedia’s fate is also an open question. What happens when Jimmy Wales can’t administer and fundraise for it anymore? How long until some hacks get their hooks in and corrupt it like so many other private media outlets?
That’s exactly why it’s freely licensed, because we can’t even trust King Jimbo.
I mean, just having the ability to roll up your own Wiki is very handy.
I would appreciate a way to archive the citations, so that a link-break down the line doesn’t cause the raw data to be lost. But that’s a problem with copywrite and IP more than anything Wikipedia does natively.
Sure, that’s a work around. But it relies on a trusted third party, along with wiki mods who don’t yank the entry because they don’t recognize the archived source as a valid citation.
It isn’t a feature integrated into the encyclopedia.
Queue the return of the door to door Encyclopedia salesman. Soon everyone will have a World Book Encyclopedia set in their home again!
I still have my dad’s 1957 edition sitting on my childhood bedroom shelf.
It is genuinely kind of wild to read through that thing, in light of modern history.
educated reality has a liberal bent
conservatives don’t like this
I wish it did. Unfortunately, conservatives seem to rule our world far more often than not.
I just watched a tech video that reviewed two North Korean smartphones. Its autocorrect assertively blocks out or autoreplaces anything deemed unfit by the government, along with absolute control of what can be done on it, and absolute fingerprinting of anything sent.
I was reminded of this for no reason.
link?
I wish I could get info about north korea that isn’t from a totally untrustworthy source, dailynk is nonsense
https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-daily-nk-news-north-korea-brought-by-cia/285873/
I don’t believe Elon sees any of this honestly. In his eyes, this is what it is: racist and highly propogandized bullshit. This is because Elon is a racist, highly politically bias asshole.
Musk is clearly a Nazi.
First, there’s the Nazi salute. There’s no reason to do that unless you are a Nazi.
Second, Nazis called Hitler my Furer, and he’s rewriting it this way specifically for this reason. It is an honorific title and he’s showing honor to Hitler.
Third, Musk defects from accusations he’s a Nazi (“that’s a crazy thing to say”) but he never responds by saying “What Hitler did was horrible and I’m not a Nazi and detest their ideology” which is what someone would say if not a Nazi.
The scary thing about this is Musk will soon control a large robot army. At that point, he could appoint white supremacists to lead the robot army and pick up where Hitler left off. This is a real threat for Jewish people as well as other minorities.
Third, Musk deflects from accusations he’s a Nazi (“that’s a crazy thing to say”) but he never responds by saying “What Hitler did was horrible and I’m not a Nazi and detest their ideology” which is what someone would say if not a Nazi.
This is the most important point, IMO. Fascists who want mainstream acceptance know not to have swastika tattoos and not to openly say they love Hitler. They will always try to have some plausible deniability. Don’t get dragged into their bullshit arguments. There’s no point in debating whether the nazi salute was some other motion that was misinterpreted. Even if it was, the first thing a non-nazi would do would be to clarify that they are not a nazi and don’t want nazis to think they’re their allies. Even if Musk had completely inadvertently stumbled upon the love and support of the nazis via a series of misunderstandings (lol), at this point in time he is deliberately choosing to be part of them.
Here is Musk at 3:08:01 saying he’s not a nazi… and then going on to say you’re not a nazi unless you’re literally invading Poland and doing the holocaust. That is literally the only objectionable thing about the nazis. Not their “fashion sense or mannerisms”. Yes that was a direct quote. There is really only one type of person that would not mention as objectionable the nazi ideology or all the acts of violence that are not at the same scale as the holocaust.
Tbh, from a historical point of view, The Führer was used to describe Hitler. Now in Germany, it’s basically only used to refer to him.
I’m not for deleting history, and I think the context is important. People needs to know why The Führer or “der Führer” is bad.
A context which I think would have helped in another example would be the N-word. If everyone was really taught the history around that word, I think/hope alot of people would think twice before using it today.
Or is that only me?
Mentioning Adolf Hitler’s title (Führer) is fine (and the information about such title should be included in the wikipedia artcile about him) but why refer to him accross the article by such title?
That’s a good point. But The Führer is not something positive, and I wouldnt think much about it.
I’m don’t think this was an intentional way to make him sound better. I think we should be much more aware of fact checking what it says, than overusing a historical word to describe Hitler. That might just be an AI thing.
With Grok, it’s always a safe bet to assume malevolence is the cause for any changes.
honorific one clause later, writing that Hitler served as “Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934 until his suicide in 1945.”
if it’s his honorific and not his official title then that should be clarified… Musk is a nazi, i’m sure grokepedia is a bunch of revisionist bullshit, but it’s not really the smoking gun and seems more like grok not groking the difference between his title and nickname.
also it pisses me off that they stole grok from the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
“Grok” comes from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, where it was a Martian loan-word.
Grok is also a word in hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and is specifically named as the inspiration for Grok….
but thanks for playing “i read google ai overview”Here’s your AI overview you dip head, it’s not fucking in that book
The word “grok” is not in the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Instead, “grok” is a neologism coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It means to understand intuitively or deeply, often with empathy. Although some discussions and online posts mistakenly associate “grok” with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the term actually originates exclusively from Heinlein’s work. In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, different slang words appear such as “sass,” “hoopy,” and “frood,” but “grok” is not one of them. The recent AI called Grok is reportedly modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide in style or spirit, but the word itself is Heinlein’s creation and not part of Adams’ original book. Therefore, “grok” is not a word from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book but from another classic sci-fi novel enti
As a long-time fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, I have no memory of the word ‘grok’ appearing, and the internet at large appears to agree.
I read Stranger in a Strange Land a couple decades ago, and the word is presented in a way that’s pretty easy to remember where you got it from.
I don’t tend to use Google AI overview or any other such tools to get answers like this to quip back at people, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t just assume I did.
It’s a stranger in a strange land, not very well red are we
It’s not that clear really. His official titles would’ve been president and chancellor and he only got one of those in a manner the Weimar constitution legally envisioned. So the system, by which we would decide what an official title is today, was abused and then suspended all together. The title “der Führer” was basically a google translate from “il duce” in Italy and is not entirely honorific because he was leader of the Nazi party first. And he continues to be referred to by this semi-unofficial, semi-honorific title even in history books today and they don’t always bother to disambiguate or add that they mean it sarcastically. So while Grok should be shot into space. And Nazi saluting Melon Usk deserves to be under this much scrutiny and more and can otherwise go eff himself as far as I’m concerned. The Ockham’s razor for this gaff tells me the LLM just regurgitated book knowledge and nobody bothered to filter this with 2025 sensibilities. Not great but also more of a storm in a teacup. This won’t make the top ten of atrocious things coming from the Melon.
I was also looking for a word other than ‘honorific.’ I find it has a positive connotation and should not apply to the titles of such infamous individuals as Hitler or Mussolini. But I could not come up with anything snappy.
we could just say “unofficial title”?
Remember when he did that Nazi salute, and we kept hearing it totally wasn’t a Nazi salute, and the Trump administration kept saying that we were all just looking for imaginary things to be outraged over?
Then why is he having Grok rewrite Wiki and calling Hitler the Führer, Bart?
yeah, he was a big nazi
It’s the holidays and he misses his dad…
he misses his sister mom too. She probably gives him special favors
That’s the official turf Reich history. If we don’t win this will be what children will learn in the Shitler youth soon.
Thats why many people have gotten active, and getting others active! Together we all can do anything!
the page on Hitler goes on for some 13,000 words before the first mention of the Holocaust.
i dunno, that seems a bigger problem to me than recognizing hitler’s title was der fuhrer.
Gross.
That’s the true meaning of Grok.
We truly are on the precipice of a dark age, aren’t we?
when trump croaks, shit either gets bad then alot better, or shit gets bad then alot worse
