Grokipedia’s entry on gender, for instance, began with the sentence: “Gender refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex….”
Wikipedia’s starts with: “Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioural aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender”.
Musk’s own Grokipedia entry differed strikingly from the Wikipedia page on the same subject.
It described some of his pursuits in breathless terms, saying his pushes for artificial intelligence “emphasise AI safety through truth-oriented development rather than heavy regulation” and that certain “releases reflect xAI’s rapid iteration, with Musk highlighting Grok’s design for maximal truth-seeking and reduced censorship”, citing xAI’s own website to make that point.
On the section about Musk’s work in the United States Doge Service, it included an error regarding Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who left the group before it became part of Trump’s Administration in January: “Post-departure, the initiative emphasised sustained, less aggressive efficiencies, with Ramaswamy assuming a more prominent role”.
In contrast to Wikipedia’s “Accolades” section, Musk’s Grokipedia page concluded with a section titled “Recognition and Long-Term Vision” that expounded on his beliefs: “His long-term vision prioritises safeguarding human consciousness against existential threats, emphasising the establishment of a self-sustaining multi-planetary civilisation as a hedge against planetary-scale catastrophes on Earth,” it said.
The project is Musk’s latest bid to harness Grok, the ChatGPT-like AI system developed by his company xAI, to offer right-leaning, freewheeling alternatives to popular mainstream tech tools.
At launch, Grokipedia’s homepage boasted that the site has about 885,000 articles, whereas the English-language Wikipedia has more than eight million.
The site went live without fanfare or explanation, a week after the date Musk had initially set for its launch.
On October 20, he said he was postponing the launch to the end of that week, explaining: “We need to do more work to purge out the propaganda”. He has not publicly posted about it since.
A minimalist homepage bore the title “Grokipedia v0.1” and a search bar where users could type in queries.
Grokipedia’s articles appeared to be derived from the same large language model that underlies the Grok chatbot on X, formerly Twitter, which Musk purchased and renamed in 2022.
That could mean it has access, at least in theory, to the latest X posts from the site’s hundreds of millions of users, which it can use to inform articles and keep them up-to-date.
It could also make Grokipedia prone to the sort of high-profile gaffes that have dogged the Grok chatbot at times.
Earlier this year, the bot began spouting a conspiracy theory about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to unrelated questions.
In other instances, it has spewed anti-Semitic slurs, generated images that virtually “undressed” female X users, and confidently misdiagnosed an injury. In each case, Musk or X blamed coding errors and eventually remedied the issue.
In 2017, Musk tweeted: “I love Wikipedia. Just gets better over time”. The billionaire entrepreneur soured on the site in recent years, taking issue at times with how its “Elon Musk” article portrayed him and accusing it of liberal bias as Musk’s own politics grew more conservative.
Earlier this year he tweeted: “Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!”
The owner of X and xAI has joined a chorus of right-leaning critics, including an ousted Wikipedia co-founder, who say the online encyclopedia – which has a policy of remaining neutral on ideological debates – too often holds up a liberal lens to hot-button issues such as climate science, vaccines, and the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Musk announced his intention to build Grokipedia on September 29, in response to an X post from President Donald Trump’s AI tsar, Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, who called Wikipedia “hopelessly biased”.
Before Grokipedia’s launch, some observers said they expected it to draw heavily on Wikipedia for its content.
“Every major AI system trains on Wikipedia’s freely licensed knowledge,” said Stephen Harrison, a journalist and author who has covered Wikipedia extensively.
“The irony is that Grokipedia will be built on the unpaid labour of the volunteer Wikipedia editors Musk has gone out of his way to vilify.”
In an interview with the Post last week, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said he would be curious to see Grokipedia when it launched but didn’t have high expectations.
AI language models “aren’t good enough to write encyclopedia articles”, Wales said. “There will be a lot of errors.”
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.