Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, his artificial intelligence-powered encyclopedia, on Monday.
The site, created by Musk’s xAI company, crashed shortly after going live, leaving users unable to access the platform for a brief period.
Grokipedia aims to compete with Wikipedia, after Musk’s repeated criticism of the platform for what he calls “propaganda.”
Highlights
- Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-powered encyclopedia aimed at competing with Wikipedia, but it crashed shortly after launch.
- Grokipedia features nearly 900,000 AI-generated articles, many closely resembling Wikipedia, but framed from Musk’s right-leaning perspective.
- Critics accuse Grokipedia of copying Wikipedia content word for word and including biased, controversial views tied to Musk.
- Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales disputes Musk’s claims of left-wing bias and defends Wikipedia’s ongoing efforts for neutrality.
- Experts warn that Grokipedia reflects Musk’s control over knowledge, continuing his trend of pushing right-leaning influence online.
Musk launched his AI-powered encyclopedia, Grokipedia, on Monday
Image credits: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Musk has promised that Grokipedia will provide a less biased alternative.
The site listed nearly 900,000 AI-generated articles by Monday evening, but some early users said that large portions appeared to be adapted or copied directly from Wikipedia.
The entries closely resemble Wikipedia, which houses nearly 8 million human-written entries, but the topics are framed around Musk’s right-leaning ideology.
Musk's own Grokipedia page features a “Recognition and Long-Term Vision” section—his take on Wikipedia’s “Accolades.”
“His [Musk’s] long-term vision prioritizes safeguarding human consciousness against existential threats, emphasizing the establishment of a self-sustaining multi-planetary civilization as a hedge against planetary-scale catastrophes on Earth,” the page says.
Grokipedia also includes pages on political figures. Its entry on former President Joe Biden lists policies and historical events but notes what it calls “severe empirical setbacks” during his presidency, a different phrasing from the neutral language used on Wikipedia.
Miranda Jeyaretnam from TIME magazine also criticized Grokipedia for containing descriptions of Musk’s views, such as the “woke mind virus” that Musk claimed “killed” his estranged transgender daughter. His daughter is alive.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said in an interview that he does not believe AI can replace Wikipedia’s accuracy. Wales said he leads an internal working group focused on promoting neutral points of view.
Musk promised that Grokipedia will provide a less biased alternative to Wikipedia, which he criticized for being ‘woke’
Image credits: Horacio Villalobos Corbis/Getty Images
“I try to tease out what is the negative something in there that I could try to improve,” Wales said. “It’s digging in and doing the work. That’s the only thing I know how to do.”
Wikipedia, which was founded almost 25 years ago, has faced increasing criticism from conservatives for being too “woke,” with Musk even calling it “Wokepedia.”
Wales rejected Musk’s claims about Wikipedia having a left-wing bias.
“The idea we’ve become some sort of crazy left-wing activists is just incorrect – factually incorrect,” Wales said on BBC Science Focus’ Instant Genius podcast on Monday. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t areas where we can improve.”
A recent Manhattan Institute report found that Wikipedia entries were more likely to negatively represent political leaders of the right than their left-leaning counterparts.
The study also highlighted that Wikipedia’s entries discussing right-leaning stances were frequently discussed with emotions of anger and disgust, while left-leaning ideology was linked with joy.
Almost anyone can create or edit Wikipedia articles, but editors regularly review all the content to maintain accuracy.
A 2007 program, WikiScanner, developed by Virgil Griffith, found that CIA and FBI computers were editing entries on Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
The program also found that computers at several other organizations had edited articles related to them.
Wales also pushed back on Musk’s objection to how his Nazi salute allegations were described on Wikipedia earlier this year.
“Is there anything you consider inaccurate in that description?” Wales said on X in January. “It's true you did the gesture (twice) and that people did compare it to a Nazi salute (many people) and it's true that you denied it had any meaning.”
Grokipedia reflects Musk’s personal views in other entries. For example, its page on gender transition, which Musk has publicly opposed, questions the quality of evidence for medical treatments, calling them “limited and of low quality,” whereas Wikipedia says scientific understanding of gender transition has existed for decades.
The site also features entries on tech companies like OpenAI and public figures such as former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, highlighting Musk’s criticisms of them.
Grokipedia was found to reflect Musk’s right-leaning ideologies
Image credits: Wikipedia
“The impulse to control knowledge is as old as knowledge itself,” Ryan McGrady, a research fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told The New York Times. “Controlling what gets written is a way to gain or keep power.”
Grokipedia is only the latest addition to Musk’s online ecosystem. He previously reinstated right-wing creators on X and used the platform to drive government funding cuts. He also tweaked xAI’s chatbot, Grok, to lean further to the right.
Human visits to Wikipedia have declined this year, while automated scraping of Wikipedia data by AI systems has increased.
Selena Deckelmann, chief technology officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, said, “People will take information they get from these tools at face value, and that information may or may not be correct. The value Wikipedia has provided for over a decade is that it lets people dig into the sources.”