Elon Musk launched his own version of Wikipedia earlier this week — promising users “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. The somewhat unoriginally named Grokipedia has been touted as a potential rival for the well-known online encyclopedia and currently houses more than 885,000 articles. The AI-driven platform has also faced vehement criticism from several quarters, with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales voicing concern about the use of large language models to create a trusted source of information.

“The LLMs he is using to write it are going to make massive errors. We know ChatGPT and all the other LLMs are not good enough to write Wiki entries. I’m not optimistic he will create anything very useful right now,” Wales warned during the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit on Tuesday.

Grokipedia had been a project under xAI for quite some time and reportedly uses the same core model as the Grok chatbot. Musk has previously criticised Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and called for people to stop donating to the site run by a non-profit foundation. The Grokipedia entry on Wikipedia also accuses the site of having “systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.” 

How does Grokipedia work?

The Grokipedia site has a minimalist appearance with little beyond a search bar that users can type in queries. It states that it has 885,279 articles. Wikipedia, meanwhile, says it has more than 7 million articles in English. Users can search for articles on various topics (the same as Wikipedia) such as Taylor Swift, the baseball World Series, or Buckingham Palace.

While Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, it’s unclear how exactly Grokipedia articles are put together. Reports suggest the site is powered by the same xAI model that underpins Musk’s Grok chatbot, but some articles are seemingly adapted from Wikipedia. The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement Tuesday that it is “still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works.”

Netizens have flagged several inconsistencies since the platform was launched — including blatant ‘copying’ of content from Wikipedia and ‘reframing’ of historical events. Others noticed that several Grokipedia pages were completely devoid of citations and sources. Social media users also contrasted the way in which Grok and Wiki covered the same events — noting drastic changes in framing and context for controversial topics.

“Grokipedia rips off directly from Wikipedia, word for word, formatting, structure, the whole thing…There is no way to know if Grok has changed something subtle, or it’s 100% verbatim. There is no message to that effect. Saying ‘fact checked by Grok two days ago’ is the encyclopedic equivalent of ‘trust me bro’. Bottom of the page says ‘The content is adapted from Wikipedia’. HOW ‘adapted’ is it? Is it a 100% copy? 99%, 90%? What’s changed and how? Grokipedia also ends up as a mix of copying Wikipedia and completely rewriting everything. It’s like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get,” noted X user Dave Jones.

Another user pointed out the drastic difference in the Grokipedia and Wikipedia entries on George Floyd.