Elon Musk’s Proposal to ‘Cleanse’ AI Knowledge Base Sparks Expert Concerns

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI plans to rewrite “all human knowledge” to train a new version of the Grok chatbot.

We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.

Then retrain on that.

Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2025

“We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors,” Musk wrote.

The plan involves retraining on this new information. According to the entrepreneur, there is “far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data” today.

The billionaire faced criticism for this decision. AI specialist Gary Marcus likened Musk’s plan to a dystopia.

Straight out of 1984.

You couldn’t get Grok to align with your own personal beliefs so you are going to rewrite history to make it conform to your views.

— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) June 21, 2025

“Straight out of ‘1984’. You couldn’t get Grok to align with your own personal beliefs so you are going to rewrite history to make it conform to your views,” he wrote.

Bernardino Sassoli de Bianchi, a professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of Milan, called the decision dangerous.

“This goes far beyond technological risk and enters the realm of epistemic manipulation. When powerful billionaires see history as malleable simply because outcomes do not align with their beliefs, we are dealing not with innovation but with narrative control. Rewriting training data to fit ideology is wrong on every conceivable level,” the expert noted.

Back in May, due to an “unauthorized prompt modification,” Grok addressed the topic of “white genocide” in South Africa without a corresponding user request.