Elon Musk’s anti-woke alternative to Wikipedia — an aspiration he announced less than a month ago — went live on Monday, with “Grokipedia” already boasting nearly 900,000 articles by the end of its first day. “The goal of Grok and Grokipedia.com is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will never be perfect, but we shall nonetheless strive towards that goal,” Musk wrote on X, referring to the launch-day Grokipedia as Version 0.1, and promising that “Version 1.0 will be 10X better.”
Grokipedia is powered by xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company that also drives the generative AI “Grok” chatbot. Many of the pages we sampled are extremely comprehensive, detailed and lengthy. Journalists and social media users quickly set out to compare how the two sites differ in covering controversial topics. For example, regarding gender transition, the New York Times reported that “[Grokipedia] said medical treatment for transgender people was based on evidence that was ‘limited and of low quality’ [while] Wikipedia’s corresponding page said scientific understanding of the subject had existed for decades.” We also observed that Grokipedia’s page covers theories that the huge spike in trans identification since the early 2010s may be driven by “social influence or contagion.”
Wikipedia, launched in 2001, has grown into the seventh most-visited website globally, boasting over 7 million articles across 329 languages and attracting more than 4 billion visits each month. Officially, Wikipedia operates under the policies of “verifiability” and “neutrality,” but in practice, the world’s largest online encyclopedia is routinely manipulated by activists ranging from progressive leftists seeking to dominate the culture war to West Bank settlers working to mold opinions about the State of Israel.
The brainwashing risk is no longer confined to everyday human users, as today’s leading AI models draw heavily on the supposed facts found on Wikipedia pages. Having said that, many Grokipedia 0.1 entries on uncontroversial topics have passages that are word-for-word identical to their Wikipedia counterparts. In September, responding to a question posed by an X user about Grok’s use of Wikipedia, Musk said, “We should have this fixed by end of year.”
