GenAI Fast-tracks into the enterprise

• It is the intent of Wharton to annually produce an outlook on AI Industry adoption. GBK Collective led the inaugural study in 2023 alongside Wharton Professor Stefano Puntoni. In 2024, we began our joint study. Now in its third year, this repeated cross-sectional study is sponsored by Wharton Human-AI Research, part of the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; GBK Collective performed research and analysis.

“A community of unknowledge”: A social-psychological model of the self-reinforcing cycle of social identity-driven willful ignorance and conspiracy beliefs

• This paper explores willful ignorance as a socially motivated, group-based phenomenon closely tied to conspiracy beliefs. While prior research has emphasized individual motives, we highlight how groups actively ignore dissonant information to protect identity, cohesion, and status. Drawing on organizational, socio-political, and historical contexts, we show how both powerful and marginalized groups use willful ignorance to sustain conspiratorial narratives that affirm their worldview and deflect moral accountability. We propose the Social Identity-Driven Willful Ignorance and Conspiracy Beliefs (SIDWI-CB) model, a dual group-based motivational pathways framework that explains how intergroup symbolic and realistic motivations drive selective ignorance fueled by conspiracy beliefs. This framework offers a new lens for understanding how identity and power dynamics shape belief persistence, with broad implications for addressing polarization, misinformation and conspiracy beliefs, and collective decision making.

What Elon Musk’s Version of Wikipedia Thinks About Hitler, Putin, and Apartheid

• Grokipedia is the latest step in Musk’s obsession with the mainstream media and institutions he believes have poisoned the world and the web. In 2022, soon after Musk purchased Twitter, he reinstated banned extremist accounts and appeared to tweak the platform’s recommendation algorithm, leading to what independent researchers called “unprecedented” rises in hate speech. Musk effectively turned Twitter, which he renamed X, into a bastion of white supremacy. A year later, Musk’s company xAI launched the chatbot Grok as an antidote to the left-wing biases he perceived in other top AI products; Grok has since obsessed over a conspiracy theory about “white genocide” particularly in South Africa, praised Hitler, told me what the “good races” are, and explicitly repeated Musk’s personal views in response to queries about controversial topics.

Tasks

• Pictures to Goodwill
• Groceries – done
• Water plants – rained! Done!
• MD Food bank

SBIRs

• More prompt generation – got most of the parts working. Went down a rabbit hole for streaming, but realized it was a distraction.
• Test runs on RAG-based story generation – started