Show Notes
In this episode of Show & Tell, we speak to Renée DiResta about Grokipedia and the contestability of AI-mediated information sources. Grokipedia is worth studying not just as “a culture war artifact,” she said, but because even if Musk’s AI encyclopedia fades away, “something like it will exist at some point, and we may as well get in and figure out how to audit it now.”
What You'll Learn: 📍AI-on-AI auditing and the contestability of AI encyclopedias: How Renée set up her Claude agent to review Grokipedia entries and coax Grok into improving them. 📍Automated monitoring checks: How a weekly script that logged in and reported edit status revealed that Grokipedia had stopped accepting edits. 📍Simple multi-model pipelines: How her AI Notes writer on X uses Zentropi to screen posts, has Claude Sonnet and Opus compete on drafts, and uses ChatGPT as a checker. 📍Publishing for the machines: Why AI systems can only cite what they can retrieve, and why investigators and fact-checkers need to put primary sources online in formats machines can read.
Links mentioned in the episode 📍"Grokipedia Stopped Reviewing Edits in April. It Didn't Tell Anyone" (Lawfare): https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/grokipedia-stopped-reviewing-edits-in-april.-it-didn-t-tell-anyone 📍”Grokipedia cites a Nazi forum and fringe conspiracy websites” (Indicator): https://indicator.media/p/grokipedia-cites-a-nazi-forum-and-fringe-conspiracy-websites 📍Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality: https://www.reneediresta.com/books/ 📍Zentropi: https://zentropi.ai/ 📍Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/ 📍Renée's newsletter: https://www.reneediresta.com/newsletter/
About Renée DiResta: Renée is an associate research professor at Georgetown, former technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and author of "Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality."
About Show & Tell: Show & Tell from Indicator takes you inside digital investigations as leading journalists, OSINT investigators, threat analysts, and researchers walk through real cases they've cracked. Each episode features a recognized figure in the OSINT, digital investigations, or trust & safety community. They don't just tell us what they did — they show us. Hosted by Indicator co-founders Alexios Mantzarlis and Craig Silverman.
More from Show & Tell from Indicator
In this episode of Show & Tell, we spoke to Shayan Sardarizadeh about his approach to debunking viral fakes for BBC Verify. "I want to check everything for AI," he told us. "I don't care where it comes from. If it comes from a national TV, if it comes from a politician posting it on their official TikTok, I don't trust anything." What You'll Learn: 📍Choosing where to look, and what to ignore when it comes to viral fakes 📍Why AI detectors are now an essential element of verification and why Shayan prefers the SynthID-based ones 📍How detectors can still fail, with a worked example from a viral image of Donald Trump 📍How reverse search is an essential complement to AI detectors and a mandatory starting point for any verification task Links mentioned in the episode 📍Shayan's thread on the viral Trump image: https://x.com/Shayan86/status/2100642920437108946 📍"AI generators are now required to offer detection tools. We tested them (and they need work)" (Indicator): https://indicator.media/p/ai-generators-are-now-required-to-offer-detection-tools-we-tested-them-and-they-need-work 📍You can follow Shayan on X at @Shayan86 and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shayan-sardarizadeh-0121555a/ About Shayan Sardarizadeh: Shayan is a senior journalist at BBC Verify covering disinformation, conspiracy theories and AI. About Show & Tell: Show & Tell from Indicator takes you inside digital investigations as leading journalists, OSINT investigators, threat analysts, and researchers walk through real cases they've cracked. Each episode features a recognized figure in the OSINT, digital investigations, or trust & safety community. They don't just tell us what they did — they show us. Hosted by Indicator co-founders Alexios Mantzarlis and Craig Silverman.
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