Elon Musk and his company xAI put Grokipedia online on Monday, presented as a competitor to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, accused of ideological bias by some Republicans in the United States. The version was numbered 0.1 and as of Monday afternoon it already had more than 885,000 definitions, compared to more than 7 million in English on Wikipedia.
In a message published a week ago, the businessman decided to postpone the launch of Grokipedia for a few days, announced at the end of September, a delay justified by the need to carry out “additional propaganda purification work.”
Grokipedia’s content is generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and the generative AI assistant Grok, but it also cites multiple sources on each page. Like Republican officials, Elon Musk has periodically criticized Wikipedia for several years. In 2024, he accused the site of being “controlled by far-left activists” and asked people to no longer donate to the platform.
Results oriented
The content of certain Grokipedia articles demonstrates a results orientation, such as the page dedicated to Elon Musk. In the first summarized paragraphs, the platform indicates that the head of Tesla and SpaceX has “influenced the debate” on several topics, which has earned him “criticism from traditional media that demonstrate leftist tendencies in their coverage.”
Regarding the “Black Lives Matter” civil rights movement, Grokipedia writes that it “mobilized millions of people.” “However, these demonstrations caused riots, (…) the most expensive in the history of property damage insurance,” the encyclopedia continues, without mentioning, as Wikipedia does, that “the vast majority of the 2020 demonstrations took place peacefully.”
Created in 2001, Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia run by volunteers, funded largely by donations, and whose pages can be written or modified by Internet users. It claims a “neutral point of view” in its content.
Source: BFM TV
