Elon Musk’s new AI-powered encyclopedia, known as Grokipedia, has been criticized by Academics and fact-checkers for containing several errors. According to them, the encyclopedia lifts content and endorses political bias.
According to a report by Cryptopolitan, Elon Musk announced the launch of Grokipedia last week, claiming it would kill Wikipedia. He further claimed that it was the antidote to “Wokepedia”, noting that it was “better than Wikipedia.” This development comes as the tech billionaire announced Grokepedia as the anthology of “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” generated by his Grok AI model.
Grokipedia faces challenges and criticisms
Despite Musk’s hype, the encyclopedia witnessed a challenging debut, with experts highlighting inaccuracies in its results. An eminent British historian and expert on the Third Reich, Sir Richard Evans, found that his own Grokipedia entry was almost entirely untrue. It incorrectly listed his doctoral supervisor, his role as Regius professor of history at Cambridge, and his thesis work.
“AI just hoovers everything,” Evans told the Guardian after finding the encyclopedia gave “chatroom contributions equal status with serious academic work.” He also highlighted other errors, including the entry for Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, which repeated lies that have been debunked. According to the Guardian report, the entry for Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was also full of false claims about his life.
David Larsson Heidenblad, deputy director of the Lund Centre for History of Knowledge in Sweden, called it a “a clash of knowledge and cultures,” with the problems stemming from a flawed approach to information. “The Silicon Valley mindset is very different from the traditional scholarly approach. Its knowledge culture is very iterative, where making mistakes is a feature, not a bug,” he said.
Users criticize discrepancies found in the encyclopedia
Heidenblad also added that “By contrast, the academic world is about building trust over time and scholarship over long periods during which the illusion that you know everything cracks. Those are real knowledge processes.” Meanwhile, Musk’s Grokipedia is reportedly the first major encyclopedia to be largely created by AI, which has raised concerns about who controls the information when AI models, controlled by powerful individuals, are “holding the pen.”
Peter Burke, emeritus professor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, said: “If it’s Musk doing it, then I am afraid of political manipulation.” In a report by The Guardian, these comments were also amplified as Musk, while promoting Grokipedia on X, declared that “civil war in Britain is inevitable,” and called for an alliance with far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and also said that the far-right AfD party could “save Germany.”
Apart from the factual errors, users also discovered that Grokipedia directly lifted chunks of text from Wikipedia, the same site it intended to overtake. Andrew Dudfield, the head of AI at Full Fact, a UK-based fact-checking organization, criticized Grokipedia for its lack of transparency. “It is not clear how far the human hand is involved, how far it is AI-generated, and what content the AI was trained on,” Dudfield said.
