(Credit: Grokipedia)
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Elon Musk's Wikipedia rival, Grokipedia, has launched as an early beta, offering over 885,000 articles on various topics—all of it AI-generated.
The English-focused encyclopedia site at Grokipedia.com is Musk’s counter to Wikipedia, which the billionaire has attempted to defund because he thinks it suffers from a "woke" bias.
To create Grokipedia, Musk's xAI startup leveraged the Grok AI chatbot to write and "fact-check" all the articles. The site currently contains 885,279 articles, which is approximately 12% of the English-language articles found on Wikipedia. It lacks images, however.
The big question is Grokipedia’s accuracy. Critics argue Musk is creating the site to push his own agenda over facts. The Grokipedia article for Musk, for example, contains no mention of his Nazi-like salute at a Trump inauguration event, which is included in his Wikipedia entry.
Some topics differ in tone and approach compared with Wikipedia. For example, the Grokipedia Transgender article refers to it as “individuals whose self-perceived gender identity conflicts with their biological sex,” adding that “this mismatch often manifests as gender dysphoria,” and that social media may be causing its rise. Wikipedia defines transgender as a person who “has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.”
Meanwhile, the Grokipedia article for the Russian invasion of Ukraine cites Russian government websites several times, raising concerns about bias and Grok's ability to question credibility.
In other cases, Grokipedia can rip off content from Wikipedia. We spotted this in the entry for PCMag, which appears to contain phrases that are identical to the Wikipedia article.
(Credit: Grokipedia)
(Credit: Wikipedia)Unlike the community-driven Wikipedia, we noticed that Grokipedia doesn’t appear to allow users to submit edits. Musk, however, is promising “you will be able to ask Grok to add/modify/delete articles and it will either take the action or tell you it won’t and why.”
In the meantime, the Tesla CEO has been retweeting users on X/Twitter who say they plan on using and linking to Grokipedia over Wikipedia in the future. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who has been a vocal critic of the encyclopedia site, also tweeted: “The jury's still out as to whether [Grokipedia is] actually better than Wikipedia. But at this point I would have to say 'maybe'!"
Musk plans on open-sourcing Grokipedia as well. “Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo,” Musk tweeted.
But others are concerned Grokipedia will promote far-right talking points. On the topic of slavery in the US, Wired spotted Grokipedia publishing an entry titled “Ideological Justifications for Slavery,” which also includes a section pushing back on The New York Times’ Project 1619 to examine the consequences of slavery.