According to reports*, Elon Musk’s new AI-generated online encyclopedia, Grokipedia, begins its entry for gender with: “Gender refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex…”

Wrong! Gender and sex are not the same things!

That Grok thinks they are**, indicates it has been ‘taught’ to parrot the opinions of its human creators.  Like a young child, it is not worldly or intelligent enough to think beyond what it has been told by its groomers and so sees the world through their blinders. 

For AI as with any other computative system, the value of output is highly dependent upon the quality of input.  The first law of computer science – ‘garbage in, garbage out’ – is worth keeping in mind as AI’s very human procreators inject their offspring into as many facets of our lives and world as they can, as quickly as possible, with no oversight and often without our consent or even our awareness. 

Knowledge is power, and ignorance posing as intelligence is an abuse of power, not a sign of the glorious and unadulterated progress which AI’s promoters claim to be offering to the world.

CAVEAT UTILITOR!

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* This post refers to a report by Will Oremus and Faiz Siddiqui in the electronic edition of the Washington Post on 2025-10-27 titled “Elon Musk launches a Wikipedia rival that extols his own ‘vision’”

** In case there’s any question: ‘Male’ and ‘female’ are classifications of sex, which is about biology and can mean, depending on who is speaking, which chromosomes a person’s cells carry, which type of reproductive cells their body produces, which genitalia it exhibits, etc.   ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ can refer to various selections from a wide range of public behaviors, perceptions, expectations and putative rules which are loosely and collectively referred to as gender.  Sex and gender terms are sometimes congruent, sometimes not, but they are not the same things, as Grok seems to believe.

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