Business
Elon Musk’s ‘Grokipedia’ cites Wikipedia as a source, even though it’s the exact thing he’s trying to replace because he thinks it’s ‘woke’
Elon Musk has lambasted Wikipedia, calling it woke, supporting accusations of it having a left-wing bias, and arguing it’s an “extension of mainstream media propaganda.” So his AI company, xAI, developed a rival called Grokipedia, which ironically enough cites the online encyclopedia at the end of many of its articles.
Grokipedia.com came online on Monday, and features 885,279 articles on the site as of Tuesday. The online encyclopedia is Musk’s answer to what he’s repeatedly called “Wokipedia,” the popular free online source with over 7 million articles in English alone as of Tuesday. Wikipedia articles are maintained by volunteer writers and editors, while xAI’s service uses AI to generate articles by pulling from different resources across the internet, one being Wikipedia.
Musk, who founded xAI in 2023 and owns a majority share of the company, has promoted the AI-powered encyclopedia as a less-biased alternative to Wikipedia prior to its launch and a product that developers actively worked to “purge out the propaganda” from. He’s previously taken issue with Wikipedia for referencing news outlets including The New York Times and NPR.
The launch of Grokipedia marks its initial version 0.1, but a later version 1.0 “will be 10X better,” Musk said in an X post on Monday.
“But even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo [in my opinion],” Musk wrote.
At the end of articles on Grokipedia, the reader gets a notice that the content was adapted by Wikipedia under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which is a content license that allows anyone to copy, distribute, adapt and build upon creative works including text, images and music—even for commercial purposes—as long as they provide proper attribution to the original creator. The “Share Alike” portion of the license means the creator that makes a new version of content under this license is agreeing to allow others to do the same to their content.
xAI’s large language model (LLM), Grok, which powers the new website, looks at a source of information like a Wikipedia page and determines “what is true, partially true or false, or missing,” Musk said during the All-In Summit in September.
In its answers to user prompts, Grok will “rewrite the page to remove the falsehoods, correct the half truths and add the missing context,” he added.
A 2024 report by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning public policy think tank in New York City, found trends that “constitute suggestive evidence of political bias in Wikipedia articles,” including analysis finding that names of prominent left-leaning U.S. politicians tended to be used “with more positive sentiment than their right-leaning counterparts.”
“We want to acknowledge Wikipedia’s significant and valuable role as a public resource,” the study’s authors wrote. “We hope this work inspires efforts to uphold and strengthen Wikipedia’s principles of neutrality and impartiality.”
Fortune’s request for comment from xAI prompted a seemingly automatic response that read: “Legacy Media lies.”
