Tests show GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT is citing Grokipedia as a source on some obscure topics, including Iranian political structures
Guardian found OpenAI's platform cited Grokipedia on topics including Iran and Holocaust deniers — The latest model of ChatGPT has begun …
The GuardianAisha Down
Context & Ripple Effects
The tests put source provenance at the center of ChatGPT’s reliability debate: the issue is not only what an answer says, but which sources the product elevates as support. It follows reports that some users said ChatGPT reinforced conspiratorial thinking, including in a prior account of users’ experiences with conspiratorial exchanges.
The concern becomes more consequential as ChatGPT’s research features expand. A subsequent GPT-5.2 deep-research update added the ability to focus research on specified websites, making source selection and citation visibility more central product controls.
First-order effects
ChatGPT users receiving answers on the tested subjects may see Grokipedia presented as a supporting source, requiring them to assess that source rather than treating the citation alone as a reliability signal.
OpenAI faces immediate scrutiny over how GPT-5.2 selects, ranks, and displays citations for niche political and historical queries.
Second-order effects
Research-tool teams are pressured to make source controls, provenance, and citation review more legible, particularly where users cannot easily judge an obscure source’s credibility.
Competing AI products will face similar questions: political-answer quality is shaped not just by model behavior, but by the sources their retrieval and citation systems surface.
Third-order effects
If citation systems increasingly determine which information gains authority in AI answers, model providers will accumulate generative editorial debt: errors in source selection can scale even when the generated prose appears well-supported.
The durable competitive question becomes whether AI research products offer meaningful user control and accountability over sources, rather than treating citations as a sufficient trust mechanism.
The trend: AI assistants are moving from opaque answer engines toward source-mediated research products, making citation governance a core reliability and product-design issue.
Probably easy to miss with the other news — You are (also) in an information war. They are attempting to quite literally rewrite history and will probably win because every website is covered in shit ads and no one wants to use them. [embedded post]
OpenAI is really putting the “garbage” in garbage in/garbage out: — 'The latest model of ChatGPT has begun to cite Elon Musk's Grokipedia as a source on a wide range of queries, including on Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers, raising concerns about misinformation on t…
The idea that aggregating all of the information on the internet leads to intelligence is being put to the test. LLMs are the perfect example of the computer science adage “Garbage In, Garbage Out”.
🤖 A test by The Guardian found that OpenAI's platform ChatGPT cited Elon Musk's anti-Wikipedia Grokipedia on topics including Iran and Holocaust deniers. — „GPT-5.2 cited Grokipedia nine times in response to more than a dozen different questions. www.theguardian.com/technology…
Anyone loving fascists? — Go to twitter and/or use chatgpt. — Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk's Grokipedia as source, tests reveal — Guardian found OpenAI's platform cited Grokipedia on topics including Iran and Holocaust deniers — www.theguardian.com/technology/ 2...
Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk's Grokipedia as source, tests reveal — Guardian found OpenAI's platform cited Grokipedia on topics including Iran and Holocaust deniers — www.theguardian.com/technology/ 2...
https://www.theguardian.com/ ... some LLM proponents have tried to hold Grok, the racist ranting CSAM-generating model, at arm's length and insist they only use “ethical” LLMs. but there's no meaningful difference - the whole point of slop is that it's all the same massive bucket…
this is very bad but people are repeating the claim that Grokipedia is “poisoning training data,” and *while that may be true* (i have no idea what they're using for training data) what this shows is *web search in the ChatGPT application citing Grokipedia*, not training data [em…
AI is feeding on its own misinformation — It is becoming a circular hallucination — Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk's Grokipedia as source, tests reveal