A new online encyclopedia has been born, it’s called Grokipedia, it’s based on Grok’s artificial intelligence and directly challenges Wikipedia. Grokipedia was born, in fact, as a declared attempt to build an online encyclopedia that is powered directly by Grok, the AI developed by Elon Musk’s xAI company. The project was launched in an initial version, identified as version 0.1, and presents itself as a collection of knowledge that can be consulted free of charge, defined as open source, i.e. open to use by anyone. The underlying idea is to offer as an alternative to Wikipedia, an informative reference where, according to the promoters, the priority would not be consensus between volunteer editors, but the search for what is defined as “truth”.
The idea for Grokipedia was partly born from the criticism that Musk has made of Wikipedia, accused of being influenced by progressive political positions and consequently of producing content which, in his opinion, does not always represent a neutral picture of things and which is influenced by woke culture. Grokipedia, in this vision, should reduce the impact of human bias by delegating much of the synthesis and re-elaboration work directly to Grok. To find the link just type “Grokipedia” into a search engine.
What is Grokipedia and the controversies surrounding Musk’s online encyclopedia
Grokipedia has an essential interface, which in fact is very reminiscent of Wikipedia: a central search bar and structured articles with internal sections and references. Unlike the collaborative encyclopedia created in 2001, however, users cannot modify encyclopedic entries. Even when an editing button appears, it does not allow you to insert new proposals: it only shows the revisions already made, without clearly indicating who suggested them. The choice goes in the direction of reducing the presence of voluntary interventions, replacing them with the automated work of Grok, which indicates that it has verified the contents. And this is where an important critical issue emerges: generative language models are not tools designed to verify facts in the strict sense and can produce, without intention, inaccurate or invented statements (what we know as AI hallucinations, so to speak). The wording of “verified content” on Grokipedia is timeless.
Another relevant element is that some Grokipedia entries include parts that can be traced back, even directly, to Wikipedia itself. As he pointed out The Verge in an in-depth analysis, some pages report messages indicating the presence of content adapted with the “Creative Commons” license, the same one that allows the sharing and reuse of Wikipedia texts. In some cases the similarity between texts is very strong, almost word for word. This suggests that, despite the stated goal of overtaking Wikipedia, the new platform relies (at least in part) on the work of the voluntary community that Musk has openly criticized in recent days.
However, not all entries derive from already existing materials. On controversial topics, Grokipedia tends to present interpretations that emphasize the presence of dissent or discussion where Wikipedia describes broad scientific convergences. Just to give an example, on the page on climate change, the existence of opinions that contest the idea of an almost total consensus in the scientific world on anthropic causes is highlighted, attributing an important role to the public debate in modeling the perception of the phenomenon. Likewise, on pages about figures like Elon Musk or conservative political figures, the tone is more favorable than the more balanced descriptions on Wikipedia.
Grokipedia has 885,000 fewer entries than Wikipedia: the differences
The platform, in its first version, marked with the version number 0.1, declares the availability of over 885,000 entries, a significantly lower number than the approximately 7 million entries of the English version of Wikipedia (the largest encyclopedia in the world), but the project is presented as being in the expansion phase. Musk announced that version 1.0 will be «ten times better» than the current one, declaring that the objective would be to eliminate what he defines as informative “propaganda”. For now, Grokipedia represents an experiment in the attempt to automate the construction of an encyclopedia, entrusting to a generative artificial intelligence model not only the editing of the texts, but also part of the judgment on which information to consider central and which to consider marginal.
Lauren Dickinson, spokesperson for Wikimedia Foundationthe non-profit organization that manages Wikipedia, on The Verge reassured those who fear that Grokipedia could overthrow the historic encyclopedia, saying:
Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia (…). Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting any particular point of view. Wikipedia knowledge is, and always will be, human. (…) Many experiments have been done in the past to create alternative versions of Wikipedia, but this does not interfere with our work or our mission.
