Elon Musk this week launched his “anti-woke” version of Wikipedia, called Grokipedia, promised to be a “massive improvement” over its incumbent. It comes after years of criticism from Musk that Wikipedia is part of the “woke mind virus,” unfairly conveying liberal viewpoints from legacy media sites. The new online encyclopedia, which suffered technical difficulties upon launch, uses xAI’s Grok large language model to pull information and supposedly prioritize objectivity. For example, Wikipedia’s introduction to its page on George Floyd focuses on his murder and the following protests. Grokipedia’s, meanwhile, is framed around Floyd’s criminal record and “riots causing billions in property damage.”
Other entries, which The Verge pointed out, are nearly identical to their Wikipedia counterparts, with some explicitly stating the content is adapted from the site under Creative Commons licensing laws, raising questions about how much of Wikipedia’s existing framework informed the creation of Grokipedia.
It also doesn’t eradicate legacy media citations, one of Musk’s key criticisms of Wikipedia. Grokipedia’s page about Semafor includes three references to The New York Times, which Musk often railed against for being left-leaning. While the page about Semafor is largely accurate, it includes a handful of typos, lists two founding dates, and mischaracterizes some employees’ positions.
Still, searches for “Grokipedia” were trending on Google Tuesday, with more than 100,000 searches since its launch, according to Google Trends.
