US researchers at Cornell Tech have labelled Elon Musk's AI-powered encyclopedia Grokipedia as "problematic" due to its heavy reliance on thousands of citations from questionable and unreliable sources, casting significant doubts on its viability as a trustworthy information resource. In a report released on November 14, 2025, and reviewed by Agence France-Presse, analysts Harold Triedman and Alexios Mantzarlis examined hundreds of thousands of Grokipedia articles, concluding that "sourcing guardrails have largely been lifted," leading to a higher prevalence of potentially misleading references.
Launched by Musk's xAI on October 27, 2025, as version 0.1, Grokipedia aims to rival Wikipedia by leveraging the Grok large language model for real-time, AI-generated content, but early critiques highlight its vulnerability to misinformation, particularly in politically charged topics. The platform debuted with nearly 885,000 articles, many of which were near-verbatim copies from Wikipedia, prompting accusations of lacking originality despite Musk's claims of superior breadth, depth, and accuracy.
The study's findings underscore stark differences in source quality, especially in entries related to elected officials and controversial issues. For instance, Grokipedia's page on the debunked "Clinton body count" conspiracy theory cites InfoWars, a far-right outlet infamous for spreading falsehoods, without any caveats on its credibility. Broader analysis revealed citations to American and Indian right-wing media, state-controlled outlets from China and Iran, anti-immigration or antisemitic websites, and platforms promoting pseudoscience or conspiracy narratives like Pizzagate and the "Great Replacement". Articles not derived from Wikipedia were found to be 3.2 times more likely to reference sources deemed "generally unreliable" by Wikipedia's editorial standards and 13 times more prone to include blacklisted domains. Such lapses, the researchers argue, amplify risks in an AI system lacking transparent human oversight, contrasting sharply with Wikipedia's community-driven verification processes.
Musk, the world's richest individual and owner of X (formerly Twitter), has positioned Grokipedia as a corrective to what he calls Wikipedia's "left-wing bias", urging his 200 million followers last year to withhold donations and dubbing it "Wokepedia". xAI's automated response to AFP's inquiry—"Legacy Media Lies"—exemplifies the company's combative stance toward traditional journalism.
On X, Musk has hyped the project, announcing on November 13 plans to rebrand it "Encyclopedia Galactica" once refined, envisioning an open-source repository of all knowledge, including multimedia, akin to a "sci-fi version of the Library of Alexandria." Supporters on the platform echo this enthusiasm, praising its potential to filter propaganda and deliver neutral, real-time updates immune to activist edits. However, even Grok itself has flagged Grokipedia as unreliable in some interactions, refusing user prompts to prioritise it over Wikipedia and labelling such requests as potential "jailbreak attempts".
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Defenders of Wikipedia, including founder Jimmy Wales, have dismissed bias allegations as "factually incorrect" in recent interviews, emphasising the site's volunteer-led neutrality and public editability. Wikimedia Foundation's chief product officer Selena Deckelmann highlighted the platform's "deliberate openness", where sources are rigorously documented and no single entity can dominate content, unlike Grokipedia's opaque AI curation. As the debate intensifies, with X users divided between those hailing Grokipedia as a bias-busting innovation and critics decrying its echo-chamber risks, the project's future hinges on xAI's ability to implement robust fact-checking—efforts Musk acknowledged by delaying the initial launch to "purge out the propaganda". This clash not only tests AI's role in knowledge dissemination but also reflects broader cultural wars over truth in the digital age.
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