Topline
Elon Musk on Monday night unveiled “Grokipedia,” an online encyclopedia built entirely using AI-generated articles designed to take on Wikipedia, which Musk and his allies have claimed is biased and “woke.”
X owner and billionaire announced the launch of version 0.1 of his Wikipedia alternative, Grokipedia.
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Key Facts
In a post on X, Musk announced that “version 0.1” of Grokipedia was now live and claimed “Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia.”
At launch, Grokipedia has over 885,000 articles compared to Wikipedia’s 7 million, but while the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia uses human authors and editors, Musk’s alternative is entirely composed of articles generated and “fact-checked” by xAI’s Grok.
Grokipedia also does not allow its users to make any edits, but Musk said users will be “able to ask Grok to add/modify/delete articles and it will either take the action or tell you it won’t and why.”
In a separate X post, Musk added that the goal of Grok and Grokipedia “is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…We will never be perfect, but we shall nonetheless strive towards that goal.”
Does Grokipedia Include Articles From Wikipedia?
Several articles on Grokipedia include a disclaimer at the bottom, which reads: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.” Wikipedia’s website already has an entry on Grokipedia, which notes that “Many articles are derived from Wikipedia articles, with some articles observed to be copied nearly verbatim.” At the time of publishing, some articles on Grokipedia, such as those on the PlayStation 5, automaker Lamborghini, and chipmaker AMD, appeared to be near-identical copies of the corresponding Wikipedia entries. Musk said he is aware of Grokipedia using Wikipedia articles and added, “We should have this fixed by end of year.”
What Has The Wikimedia Foundation Said?
In a statement shared with multiple outlets, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit which runs Wikipedia, said: “Wikipedia’s knowledge is – and always will be – human…This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.” The statement added: “Many experiments to create alternative versions of Wikipedia have happened before; it doesn’t interfere with our work or mission.”
