Musk launched Grokipedia, an anti-woke AI caricature of Wikipedia that describes abortion as death and lists “treatment approaches” for being transgender.
Elon Musk has, for years now, hated Wikipedia. In 2023, he said he’d give the website $1 billion if it changed its name to Dickipedia. In December, he urged his followers to refrain from donating to “Wokepedia.” And in January, after site editors updated his page to include his Gestapo-esque salute at Trump’s inauguration, he tweeted: “Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!” But for all his humiliating attempts to take down the popular website, Musk has done little but draw attention to himself as a free-speech-hating freak.
Musk’s obsession reached a new low on Monday, when he dropped another pile of shit onto the internet: Grokipedia.
The tantrum-throwing gazillionaire initially announced the project in late September, and it was supposed to launch last week. But on October 20, he tweeted that he needed more time to “purge out the propaganda.” After launching, he wrote that the goal of Grokipedia—and Grok—is to tell the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Well, Musk’s truth.
Grokipedia is a dark-version wannabe-Wikipedia with similar layouts, fonts, and citation styles—but the similarities stop there. Unlike the crowdsourced encyclopedia, it’s riddled with misleading and misinformed entries, many of which echo Musk’s own political leanings.
Checking out Grokipedia and WOW is it biased. Here’s a paragraph from the “article” on ICE. 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. pic.twitter.com/9Bfnwqrpq3
The “Slavery in the United States” page includes a section for “ideological justifications.” The “Russia Invasion of Ukraine” page cites the Kremlin as a reliable source. (Friendly reminder: Musk and Vladimir Putin were, until last year, closeted besties.) The entry for “Abortion” describes the process as the “death of the embryo or fetus,” a nod to the fetal personhood movement, and the page on Roe v Wade includes sections titled “Economic and Social Consequences,” “Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes,” and “Effects on Birth Rates and Demographics.”
The entry for “transgender” refers to trans women as “biological males” and says they have “generated significant conflicts, primarily centered on risks to women’s safety, privacy, and sex-based protections established to mitigate male-perpetrated violence.” It also includes a very alarming section titled “Treatment Approaches.” Further, the “White Genocide Theory” is explained as a legitimate theory, and the entry on the Equal Rights Amendment says the legislation is “often assessed as unnecessary.” There’s no page for “gay marriage,” though there is one for “gay pornography”—and it falsely blames porn for making the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic worse. Jezebel, the biblical figure, has her own entry, but Jezebel, the website, does not.
grokipedia scrapped wikipedia and used that information and turned it essentially pro hitler and pro nazi
Musk is trying to spin Grokipedia as an anti-woke competitor to Wikipedia, but the right-wingslop bucket is more like a caricature. The user design is awful, there’s little visual appeal, and Grokipedia currently has 885,279 entries—compared to Wikipedia’s 65 million (just 7 million of which are in English). It’s also generated by xAI, the same technology that runs Grok, the Twitter chatbot that turned into a Nazi over the summer after Musk gave it an update because he was annoyed it was too woke.
Wikipedia has been around since 2001 and still resembles an internet era excited to compile, share, and aggregate free information across the world. Today, it is run by a group of international volunteers and editors, and hosted by a nonprofit called the Wikimedia Foundation.
“We’re still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works,” a spokesperson from the organization said on Tuesday. “Wikipedia’s knowledge is—and always will be—human. Through open collaboration and consensus, people from all backgrounds build a neutral, living record of human understanding—one that reflects our diversity and collective curiosity. This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”
On Tuesday, Musk tweeted this is just the “version 0.1” of Grokipedia, that “Version 1.0 will be 10X better,” and that “even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia.” (It crashed the day of launch.)
In 2016, the Atlanticsaid Wikipedia was the “Internet’s favorite website.” In 2021, it was ranked the 13th most popular website on the Internet. In 2024, Wireddubbed it “The last best place on the internet.” As of today, it has millions of entries and millions of visitors every day. Meanwhile, in August, a Gallup poll identified Musk as the least popular public figure in the U.S.—falling behind even Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of a genocide. Grokipedia will hopefully follow suit.
