this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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Elon Musk Had Grok Rewrite Wikipedia. It Calls Hitler “The Führer.” (theintercept.com)
submitted 1 day ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] Devial@discuss.online 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Führer might only mean leader in Germany, but it's rarely used outside of refering to Hitler nowadays.

Leader, in modern German, would be translated as "Anführer", not "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 him, 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 "Führer und Reichsanzler" (outside of quotes only, to prevent double counting), 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") for Hitler in the entire German language Wikipedia page (which is 30-40k words long).