Last month, tech billionaire Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-powered platform, to rival online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
“Grokipedia will exceed Wikipedia by several orders of magnitude in breadth, depth and accuracy,” Musk posted on X the day after his site went live on October 27.
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In the age of generative artificial intelligence and AI-assisted search engines, Wikipedia remains an information repository authored by humans.
Yet PolitiFact found Grokipedia’s articles are often almost entirely lifted from Wikipedia. And when the entries differ, Grokipedia’s information quality and sourcing are problematic and error-prone, making it a less reliable research tool.
Musk said on an October 31 episode of the “All-In” tech and business podcast that his team instructed his company’s chatbot, Grok, to go through the top 1 million Wikipedia articles and then “add, modify and delete”.
“So that means research the rest of the internet, whatever is publicly available, and correct the Wikipedia articles, fix mistakes, but also add a lot more context,” he said on the podcast.
Grokipedia articles often contain the text “Fact-checked by Grok“.
PolitiFact reviewed Grokipedia articles and found that when they include language that’s different from what appeared on Wikipedia, the new content:
- Is not supported by citations;
- Does not provide references; or
- Introduces misleading or opinionated claims.
Grokipedia often also removes context from its articles.
A sample of Grokipedia’s 885,279 articles reveals they are subject to a similar AI-related phenomenon we first saw in May, prior to the tool’s unveiling. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr then released a Make America Healthy Again report that contained several erroneous citations, including crediting sources that did not exist.
Joseph Reagle, Northeastern University associate professor of communication studies, said Grokipedia misunderstands Wikipedia’s and AI’s strengths.
“Wikipedia’s merits are that it is the result of a community of thousands of people diligently working to create high-quality content,” Reagle said, while AI is useful when it’s interactive and accepts pushback.
Hundreds of thousands of volunteers worldwide contribute content to Wikipedia, guided by the platform’s editorial policies and guidelines.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, is aware of Grokipedia’s copying problem.
“Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” said Selena Decklemann, chief product and technology officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, in a statement to PolitiFact. “Wikipedia’s content is open source by design; we expect it will be used in good faith to educate. This issue is especially urgent as platforms like Grokipedia increasingly draw on our articles, selectively extracting content – written by thousands of volunteers – and filtering it through opaque and unaccountable algorithms.”
Entries are nearly identical, except for wrong or missing references
We looked at Grokipedia articles covering various topics including science, music and economics. In many articles we reviewed, Grokipedia links to Wikipedia articles with this statement: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.”
That means Wikipedia’s licensing allows Grokipedia to copy, redistribute and adapt the content with an attribution. It also requires Grokipedia to give the same permissions for its adapted content. (There are some articles that don’t copy from Wikipedia and don’t feature this statement, such as the article for Joseph Stalin.)
Grokipedia’s article structure is similar to Wikipedia’s, which features reference lists at the bottom. But in some instances, Grokipedia copies Wikipedia articles while omitting their citations and reference lists.
Grokipedia’s article for “Monday,” for example, includes information about the day of the week’s etymology, related religious observances and cultural references. But it contains no citations other than to say it was adapted from Wikipedia.
The Grokipedia article was a 96 percent match of Wikipedia’s “Monday” article, according to Copyscape, a plagiarism checker. The Wikipedia article, however, listed 22 references.
Sometimes Grokipedia botches citations. In the entry for “culminating point,” Grokipedia cited the wrong book chapter in which military theorist Carl von Clausewitz introduced the concept. The rest of the article text is copied from Wikipedia.
One article that differs significantly from its Wikipedia counterpart is the entry for “Hello”, a song by British singer Adele. Multiple items in the Grokipedia reference list are Instagram reels that provide secondhand, unattributed information and commentary. Wikipedia’s standards say such user-generated content is “generally unacceptable as sources”.
In the entry for the Canadian singer Feist, Grokipedia copied from Wikipedia but added a line saying her father died in May 2021. The citation led to Vice’s 2017 ranking of the 60 best Canadian indie rock songs, an article that doesn’t mention the death of Feist’s father, who was still alive that year.
Grokipedia lacks transparency on correcting errors
PolitiFact found at least one instance when Grokipedia introduced misleading information.
The Grokipedia and Wikipedia articles for “Nobel Prize in Physics” are largely the same, but one sentence Grokipedia added said, “Physics is traditionally the first award presented in the Nobel Prize ceremony.” It did not provide a citation, and it appears to be wrong: In at least the past few years, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded first.
“Unlike Grokipedia, which relies on rapid AI-generated content with limited transparency and oversight, Wikipedia’s processes are open to public review and rigorously document the sources behind every article,” Decklemann said.
Wikipedia allows anyone to contribute and edit articles, and ensures transparency by making the history of an article viewable. Some volunteers have advanced permissions and are equipped to address negative behaviour on the platform.
However, Wikipedia has come under scrutiny after an editor blocked changes to an article on the Gaza genocide page.
On Grokipedia, registered users can suggest edits to published articles. But Grokipedia has no feature allowing readers to view what edits have been made. It is unclear what happens when there are errors – whether a human or Grok corrects them, how those changes are deliberated, and how long it takes to update pages.
