Musk challenges Wikipedia with his own AI encyclopedia

Elon Musk on Monday unveiled his own version of Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia, with entries edited by xAI, his artificial intelligence company. The new project, Grokipedia, would "purge out the propaganda" flooding Wikipedia, Musk claimed in a post on his social media site, X.

Grokipedia, which briefly crashed after its launch Monday, tallied more than 800,000 AI-generated encyclopedia entries, compared with Wikipedia's nearly 8 million human-written ones. An entry on Musk said his public persona "blends innovative visionary with irreverent provocateur" and featured details of his diet, noting his consumption of "occasional indulgences like morning donuts and multiple Diet Cokes daily."

Grokipedia also has entries on OpenAI, a competitor of xAI, and political figures including President Donald Trump and the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.The new site adds to Musk's online media ecosystem, which coheres with his personal political views. On X, Musk has reinstated right-wing creators and allowed them to reach enormous audiences, and he has used X as a bully pulpit to drive govt funding cuts.

He has also tweaked xAI's chatbot, Grok, to lean further to the right. "The impulse to control knowledge is as old as knowledge itself," said Ryan McGrady, a senior research fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies encyclopedias and social media.

"Controlling what gets written is a way to gain or keep power."Some Grokipedia entries appeared to align with Musk's views. On gender transition, which Musk has publicly opposed, the site said medical treatment for transgender people was based on evidence that was "limited and of low quality."

Wikipedia's page said scientific understanding of the subject had existed for decades.Wikipedia, which debuted almost 25 years ago, has faced increasing criticism from conservatives in recent months. Musk and his political allies have argued that the online encyclopedia is too "woke" and excludes conservative media outlets from its approved citations.Musk fiercely criticised the site in Jan, after the entry on him was edited to note that he had thrown his right arm stiffly into the air in front of him - a gesture many onlookers quickly compared to a Nazi salute - during a celebratory speech honouring Trump's inauguration.

Musk has denied any meaning behind his gesture, something also included in the entry. "Since legacy media propaganda is considered a 'valid' source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda!" he posted, calling for its donors to stop contributing to the site.Musk announced his intention to build a competing site this month. "Wikipedia has achieved a dominant position. I hope Grokipedia challenges it and is able to fix that," said David Sacks, the AI czar of the Trump administration and an investor in several of Musk's companies, in his podcast.

"But the easier path might just be for Wikipedia to stop blackballing and censoring conservative publications, rather than rebuilding that whole thing.

"Wikipedia faces challenges as its entries are used to train AI, said representatives for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that oversees the online encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales, a Wikipedia co-founder, said that he did not think AI could replace the site's accuracy. NYT