Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, has started a new online encyclopedia called Grokipedia. The goal is to compete with Wikipedia. Musk first talked about this project in September and said it would share content that is "truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." He made this after complaining many times that Wikipedia spreads "propaganda."
According to Daily Dot, just like Wikipedia, anyone can edit and add information to Grokipedia pages. But there's a big difference in size. Grokipedia has less than one million pages right now, while Wikipedia has more than seven million pages just in English. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, thinks that Grokipedia's pages might be made by AI using Wikipedia's own content, but no one knows for sure how the pages are actually created.
When people started comparing the two sites, they found something pretty awkward. The Verge showed screenshots proving that Grokipedia's pages about the PlayStation 5 and Lincoln Mark VIII look almost exactly like the Wikipedia versions. People on X also noticed that Grokipedia uses way fewer sources than Wikipedia. One person showed that Wikipedia lists eight sources in the first paragraph about Bitcoin, but Grokipedia only has two sources for the same information.
People on X have been calling out Grokipedia for what looks like unfair content. One person said, "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."
Some users are worried about where Grokipedia gets its information. One person looked at the page about ICE and saw it only said good things about the agency removing undocumented immigrants.
The page only used sources from conservative groups. "Checking out Grokipedia and WOW is it biased," the person wrote. "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."
Someone else found that Grokipedia uses the Kremlin as a source when talking about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Another person said the site seems to be "just a Wikipedia dump passed through an LLM to add the right-wing sources Elon likes because he thinks Wikipedia is too left-leaning."
These problems show that Musk's idea for a better version of Wikipedia might have its own slant. One user joked, "By the time Grokipedia is done, the South will have won the Civil War and Hitler will have been merely a misunderstood visionary." People will be watching to see if the site can fix these problems with truth and fair sources.
The issues with Grokipedia are just the latest in a string of problems for Musk's reputation, as people keep questioning his different business projects and what he says online.