Elon Musk’s xAI has launched Grokipedia, an AI-powered encyclopedia pitched as a direct competitor to Wikipedia, but the new site has been found to be copying Wikipedia pages word-for-word while pushing false information and politically biased talking points.
Musk unveiled the project on Monday, claiming on his social media site X that Grokipedia would “purge out the propaganda” he alleges is flooding Wikipedia, reports The New York Times.
Despite this positioning, Grokipedia appears heavily reliant on the site it critiques. The Verge found that numerous pages, including those for the PlayStation 5 and the Lincoln Mark VIII, are “almost identical—word-for-word, line-for-line” to their Wikipedia counterparts. These copied pages include a message at the bottom stating, “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License”.
A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, told The Verge, “Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist”. Wikipedia has faced challenges from the rise of AI, with human visits to its site falling eight per cent this year as AI companies increase data scraping and search engines provide AI-generated summaries.
The new site, which claims the Grok AI model fact-checks its entries, was also immediately criticised for containing “historical inaccuracies” and far-right viewpoints, reports WIRED.
Social media may be “a contagion”
WIRED found that Grokipedia’s entry on gay pornography “falsely states that the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic”. The entry for “transgender” uses the derogatory term “transgenderism” and suggests social media may be a “contagion” that is “increasing the number of trans people”.
Other entries appear to be manipulated to align with Musk’s personal views. Grokipedia’s entry for former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal highlights Musk’s assertions about bot accounts, details that are “missing from Wikipedia”. The site’s entry for WIRED magazine includes Musk’s own criticism of the publication as “far-left wing propaganda”.
Musk, a frequent critic of Wikipedia, has argued the encyclopedia is too “woke”. He fiercely criticised the site in January after its entry on him was edited to include his use of a gesture that “many onlookers quickly compared to a Nazi salute”. NBC News noted this detail is absent from the Grokipedia entry on Musk.
Grokipedia, which launched as a “v0.1” and briefly crashed, has approximately 900,000 AI-generated articles, compared to Wikipedia’s nearly 8 million human-written entries.
