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Elon Musk releases a crowdsourced encyclopedia, Grokipedia, to rival Wikipedia. Social media users suggest that the platform rips off Wikipedia’s content, with inadequate sourcing.

What is Grokipedia?

Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, launches Grokipedia after announcing the project in September. Per an X post by Musk, the platform will host content that is “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

The launch comes after Musk’s criticism of Wikipedia for hosting “propaganda.”

Like its competitor, Wikipedia, users can edit and add content on a variety of topics. However, Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit host of Wikipedia, notices that the new platform’s pages seem to be AI-generated from Wikipedia itself, according to AP News.

It is still unclear how Grokipedia’s content is created.

According to screenshots posted by The Verge, Grokipedia’s pages for the PlayStation 5 and Lincoln Mark VIII are nearly identical to Wikipedia.

Still, Wikipedia hosts over seven million pages of content in English alone, compared to Grokipedia’s less-than-a-million pages currently.

What does social media think of Grokipedia?

On Musk’s own X, users are criticizing the Wikipedia clone and the sentiment behind the new crowdsourced content platform.

“Narcissistic conspiracy theorist and billionaire launches online encyclopedia because Wikipedia is not right-wing (too fact-based) for him and calls it ‘Grokipedia'” would have been a funny Simpsons episode 10 years ago. Now it’s just sad,” one user posts.

Others noticed a stark difference in the number of primary sources cited on Wikipedia versus Grokipedia. In one X post, a user shows that Wikipedia cites eight sources in just the first paragraph on Bitcoin. Grokipedia only uses two.

Some also suggest that Grokipedia only features biased, right-wing content. A user points to Grokipedia’s page on ICE. The page praises the federal agency’s removal of undocumented immigrants and cites right-leaning sources.

“Checking out Grokipedia and WOW is it biased. Here’s a paragraph from the ‘article’ on ICE. The three citations are to The Heritage Foundation, FAIR, and the Center for Immigration Studies. No dissenting voices allowed on Grokipedia; the only acceptable framing is Musk’s,” the poster writes.

Another noticed that Grokipedia uses the Kremlin as a source on a page about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A third X user writes, “ok, so did I understand this wrong, or is Grokipedia just a Wikipedia dump passed through an LLM to add the right-wing sources Elon likes because he thinks Wikipedia is too left-leaning?. It seems that he is trying to fix a supposed bias by adding another one on top to try and ‘even it out.'”

More social media reactions

Others chimed in with their own findings and concerns on the platform:

“By the time Grokipedia is done, the South will have won the Civil War and Hitler will have been merely a misunderstood visionary,” one X user warns. We’ll see how it turns out.

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