Lawfare Daily: Grokipedia’s Deafening Silence with Renée DiResta
Renée DiResta discusses her recent article on the halt in Grokipedia’s edit pipeline.
On August 6, Lawfare Senior Editor Kate Klonick sat down for a live discussion on Substack with Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy and a Lawfare contributing editor, about her new piece with Ronald Robertson on Grokipedia, the AI-generated encyclopedia. DiResta and Robertson found that Grokipedia’s edit-review queue froze around April 24—with over 13,000 suggestions stuck “in review” and zero resolved in the last three months—with no announcement to users or contributors.
They discuss the methodology of how DiResta and Robertson reconstructed a site-wide activity leaderboard using Grokipedia’s search typeahead, since the site publishes no rankings itself; how a mass rewrite on March 14 broke the anchors linking suggested edits to specific text, retroactively relabeling some accepted edits as “rejected”; and how the new AI information ecosystem is being shaped by out-of-date but open-access resources with no accountability.
To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.
