What do you do if you’re the richest man on Earth and don’t like Wikipedia? Start your own imitation encyclopedia, call it Grokipedia, lift a bunch of pages from the site, and let AI fill in the rest. Obviously, that’s a recipe for success.
Musk announced the launch of Grokipedia “version 0.1” on X Monday evening, qualifying any potential failures on the site as likely to be improved when version 1.0 eventually rolls around, “but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo,” the X-man opined.
Unfortunately for Musk, it’s hard to be better than Wikipedia when many of its 885,279 articles (around 12 percent of the English language Wikipedia’s 7.08 million) are derived directly from Wikipedia pages.
As pointed out by several commenters on Musk’s X post, the phrase “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons” appears at the bottom of a number of Grokipedia pages. A Google site search of Grokipedia for pages containing that phrase returns several hits, and it’s not an exhaustive list by any means, as several pages that show the phrase (MacBook Air, Crop Circle, etc.) don’t appear in Google results.
Beyond that, as The Verge points out, there are multiple pages that appear copied verbatim from their Wikipedia equivalents, which led Wikipedia to tell the publication that “even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”
We reached out to Wikimedia, but didn’t hear back.
Then there’s the AI slop
Beyond simply copying content from Wikipedia, Grokipedia appears heavily dependent on using AI to generate slop pages that even its namesake AI bot isn’t convinced are a fair representation of the facts.
Asking Grok to point out logical fallacies in Grokipedia’s page about Wikipedia, for example, leads Musk’s own AI to say that Grokipedia was “cherry-picking evidence” about Wikipedia to amplify claims that Wikipedia had a left-wing bias, as Musk has claimed in the past.
“The page is factually dense and cites sources … but it exhibits biases through selective presentation of evidence and heavy reliance on a single critical voice, creating an unbalanced critical lens,” Grok explained in response to our query. “The overall framing appeals to concerns about ‘ideological capture,’ potentially evoking emotional responses from readers skeptical of ‘woke’ institutions.”
In short, it’s an AI slop machine that’s less neutral in its presentation of facts than it is willing to endorse Musk’s personal views – and that’s after its launch was delayed by a week in order to, in Musk’s words, “purge out the propaganda.”
But you don’t need to take The Register‘s word as to whether Grokipedia is a fair and unbiased source of information: Even Elon Musk’s own AI chatbot doesn’t think it is.
“Grokipedia is not a fair and unbiased source of information—at least not in the neutral, encyclopedic sense that Wikipedia aspires to,” Grok told us when asked whether Grokipedia was trustworthy.
“It’s a critique wearing encyclopedia clothing,” the bot said. ®
