Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, an alternative to Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia with entries edited by xAI, the world’s richest man’s artificial intelligence company.
The project was made visible to the public early Tuesday morning before it apparently began blocking visitors but soon after, it was live once again.
The Wikipedia-styled digital encyclopaedia has over 885,000 articles at launch (compared to Wikipedia’s nearly eight million human-written ones), covering a wide range of topics but, unlike Wikipedia, there is an absence of hyperlinks that easily takes users to related topics.
At a glance, articles appear to be less in-depth than the popular digital encyclopedia. The Telegraph compared a page dedicated to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Wikipedia entry focuses on his current status and his past work in Gujarat in the opening paragraphs, besides mentioning that Modi is “a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Right-wing Hindutva paramilitary volunteer organisation”.
Grokipedia — in its page for the Prime Minister — focuses on “structural economic reforms, including the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 2017 to unify India’s indirect tax system and foster a single market, alongside the 2016 demonetisation of high-value currency notes aimed at reducing black money circulation and expanding the tax base, which spurred a rise in tax filings despite short-term disruptions”.
An entry on Musk said his public persona “blends innovative visionary with irreverent provocateur” and there is a mention of his “unfiltered style”. When it comes to former US President Joe Biden, Grokipedia says his presidency was “criticised for prioritising progressive spending over fiscal and security prudence”.
Wikipedia, which started 24 years ago, largely works as a collaborative effort of unpaid contributors striving for consensus. The new site adds to Musk’s online media ecosystem which falls in line with his political views. On X, he has brought back Right-wing creators, allowing them to reach a large audience base and he used X to drive US government funding cuts. There have also been reports that xAI’s chatbot, Grok, has been tweaked to lean further to the Right.
Grokipedia’s articles appear to be derived from the same language module that underlies the Grok chatbot on X, formerly Twitter, which Musk acquired in 2022. It’s unconfirmed whether the posts of hundreds of millions of users on X will be used to keep articles on Grokipedia up to date.
In 2017, Musk tweeted, “I love Wikipedia. Just gets better over time.” But lately, his stance has changed. Earlier this year he tweeted: “Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!”
David Sacks, the AI czar of Donald Trump’s administration, earlier this month said: “Wikipedia has achieved a dominant position. I hope Grokipedia challenges it and is able to fix that. But the easier path might just be for Wikipedia to stop blackballing and censoring conservative publications, rather than having to rebuild that whole thing from scratch.”
Jimmy Wales, a Wikipedia co-founder, recently told The Guardian: “There are definitely threats to the web, but they’re not necessarily coming from AI…. I think the bigger threat is the rise of authoritarianism, governments, regulations, which make it harder to have a truly open global web where people are free to share ideas.”
AI is using Wikipedia entries to train its models, which is posing to be a challenge for the digital information repository.