Last Week, Elon Musk released a version of Wikipedia called Grokipedia. This comes as the world’s wealthiest man seeks to create a new alternative information and media ecosystem imbued with his own personal point of view.
Musk’s Grok AI writes the articles, and the site imitates Wikipedia’s minimalist style, page structure, and reference format. Even so, at present, Grokipedia is much smaller altogether–just over 800,000 articles to Wikipedia’s more than 7 million.
Whilst anyone may write or edit a Wikipedia article, it is not known how much humans contribute to Grokipedia articles. If users think they have spotted an error, they can send feedback.
“The aim of Grok and Grokipedia.com is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We may never accomplish it, but we shall nevertheless always strive toward that objective,” Musk wrote on his social network platform X. He added later that he hopes to dispatch copies of Grokipedia “engraved in a stable oxide into orbit, the moon, and Mars so that it be kept for future generations.”
Many conservatives have accused Wikipedia of having a strong liberal bias; Musk, meanwhile, has charged that the website is “controlled by far-left activists.”
Users have already noted many contrasts between the articles on Grokipedia Muskanhisa and Wikipedia itself, including material about Musk.
In its version, Wikipedia calls him a “polarizing figure” who has been “criticized for false statements and non-scientific arguments, including COVID-19 misinformation as well as numerous conspiracy theories — also reinforcing anti-Jewish tropes.” The article goes on to say that after his 2022 purchase of Twitter (now X), “hate speech and disinfo” have been promoted.
His page on Grokipedia is simpler and shorter but states Musk “has influenced wider public discussions about technology, demographic exhaustion and unjust power structures.” The site also maintains that in December 2019, when he was buying Twitter, “To appease old media institutions known for their leftist sympathies… Musk made a priority of reforming content moderation.” This particular quotation has been extracted from Forbes’ tycoon rankings 2021 but not specifically attributed to any document, publication, or post.
The Grokipedia article on George Floyd, a man whose death at the hands of police in 2020 started to cause mass unrest and led to the lambasting of them for racism throughout the country, starts by saying that Floyd was ‘an American man with a lengthy criminal record including convictions for armed robbery, drug possession and theft,’ years before his death.
Wikipedia’s article opens with how Floyd was “murdered by a white police officer.” But Grokipedia’s entry on Floyd focuses specifically on the drugs in his system, which were listed as the cause of death in most medical examiner reports.
In one example after another of Grokipedia appearing to cite sources that are not even about what Grokipedia says, the entry about Floyd describes the national protests following his death as “extensive civil unrest… including riots causing billions in property damage.” But the section cites an obituary on the Texas State Historical Association website that does not say any of this at all.
In response to requests for clarification on these discrepancies, xAI’s media email has begun to auto-reply with “Legacy Media Lies.”
Musk has said Grokipedia will be subject to continuous updating, “As Grok improves, so too Grokipedia improves,” he wrote on X. “We are embedding principles of critical thinking and cogency into Grok.”
