Grokipedia: Elon Musk launches a Wikipedia with a conservative focus – and many errors

Those who rewrite history always also attempt to gain interpretive power in the present. This is also the case with Elon Musk. The tech billionaire launched a new online encyclopedia called Grokipedia on Monday. The website has published more than 800,000 articles in English on topics ranging from A for America to Z for Zebra.

With Grokipedia, Musk aims to create an encyclopedia that provides neutral information. Musk has repeatedly accused Wikipedia in the past of having a political bias and spreading inaccurate, left-liberal ideas. Musk argues that the thousands of volunteer and unpaid Wikipedia authors treat conservative media outlets unfairly.

In fact, a striking number of Wikipedia articles about current events in the US use left-liberal media outlets like the New York Times or the Washington Post as sources. Wikipedia generally advises its authors against right-wing conservative outlets like Fox News or The Daily Wire.

This has consequences for content. A 2024 analysis by the Manhattan Institute found that Wikipedia has a "mild to slight bias" toward describing right-wing politicians from the US with more negative terms than left-wing ones. No such bias was found for British politicians.

If Elon Musk has his way, Grokipedia should now correct the bias in the American section of Wikipedia. Musk writes on the social network X: "We need to do more to weed out the propaganda." He wants to achieve this with artificial intelligence. Grokipedia's entries were generated by Grok, the AI ​​model from Elon Musk's company XAI.

However, AI models are known for hallucinations, meaning they invent information or place it in the wrong context. AI tools like Grok have no understanding of political circumstances or established knowledge per se. They generate texts by predicting one word after another using a massive probability calculation.

Unsurprisingly, hours after Grokipedia's launch, posts on social media from users who found errors in the entries are increasing. For example, the portal attributed several incorrect names to a British musician.

Furthermore, various users note that Grokipedia reproduces Wikipedia pages one-to-one in many entries. The American tech portal "The Verge" compared Wikipedia and Grokipedia articles about the MacBook Air and the PlayStation 5 and found exactly the same content, "word for word and line for line."

This is also likely why many errors have crept in. A July analysis by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) found that at least 20 percent of the more than 1,000 Wikipedia entries analyzed contained information that was no longer current. "In addition, there are almost twice as many pages with information that has never been correct," the FAS writes. Overall, at least one in three Wikipedia articles has "a problem."

While the FAS analysis was based on German Wikipedia entries, there is no evidence that the English version of the encyclopedia is more accurate. In fact, some analyses from English-speaking countries found even higher rates of misinformation. However, these studies analyzed a smaller number of articles.

It's striking how differently Grokipedia and Wikipedia interpret some political figures. For example, the introduction to the Grokipedia entry on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration, omits the information that Kennedy spreads conspiracy theories and is a vaccine skeptic .

Differences are also palpable in the entry on George Floyd. Wikipedia begins with the sentence: "George Perry Floyd Jr. was an African American man who was murdered by a white police officer on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota."

Grokipedia begins its entry by stating: "George Perry Floyd Jr. was an American with a long criminal record, including convictions for armed robbery, drug possession, and theft in Texas from 1997 to 2007."

Both entries, Wikipedia and Grokipedia, are factually correct. However, the texts originate from different interpretations of George Floyd and his political legacy.

Elon Musk himself commented on the comparison of the texts: "The goal of Grok and Grokipedia.com is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We will never be perfect, but we should still strive toward that goal."

Other users criticized the Grokipedia entry on George Floyd for missing the point and purpose of an encyclopedia: George Floyd didn't become famous because he had a lengthy criminal record, but because he suffocated during a police operation. Because the purpose of an encyclopedia is to provide an overview of a topic as quickly as possible, Wikipedia's introduction is more useful than Grokipedia's.

Wikipedia is taking the new competition in stride. They are still trying to understand how Grokipedia works, writes Lauren Dickinson, head of public relations at Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia, in a statement to The Verge.

She contradicts Musk's claim that Wikipedia has a political bias. She argues that Wikipedia is "the backbone of knowledge on the internet" and informs billions of readers "without advocating a particular point of view."

Dickinson also points out that Grokipedia, like many other AI-generated texts, relies heavily on Wikipedia. "Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist."

That's true. Wikipedia is one of the most important resources for training models for all major AI companies. Grok, too, is likely to have been trained extensively using Wikipedia.

This, along with its large readership, gives Wikipedia considerable power over facts and their interpretation. Elon Musk is now attempting to seize some of this power with Grokipedia. He's unlikely to have much success. Similar competing products to Wikipedia have so far faded into insignificance after a short time.