In Grok
we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia
From
publishing falsehoods to pushing far-right ideology, Grokipedia gives chatroom
comments equal status to research
Robert
Booth
Robert
Booth UK technology editor
Mon 3 Nov
2025 06.00 GMT
The
eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness
reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving,
studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded
David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by
Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck’s social policy.
That was
some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia
launched last week by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. The problem was,
as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these
facts were false.
It was
part of a choppy start for humanity’s latest attempt to corral the sum of human
knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of “the truth, the whole
truth and nothing but the truth” – all revealed through the magic of his Grok
artificial intelligence model.
When the
multibillionaire switched on Grokipedia on Tuesday, he said it was “better than
Wikipedia”, or “Wokepedia” as his supporters call it, reflecting a view that
the dominant online encyclopedia often reflects leftwing talking points. One
post on X caught the triumphant mood among Musk’s fans: “Elon just killed
Wikipedia. Good riddance.”
But users
found Grokipedia lifted large chunks from the website it intended to usurp,
contained numerous factual errors and seemed to promote Musk’s favoured
rightwing talking points. In between posts on X promoting his creation, Musk
this week declared “civil war in Britain is inevitable”, called for the English
“to ally with the hard men” such as the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and
said only the far-right AfD party could “save Germany”.
Musk was
so enamoured of his AI-encyclopedia he said he planned to one day etch the
“comprehensive collection of all knowledge” into a stable oxide and “place
copies … in orbit, the moon and Mars to preserve it for the future”.
Evans,
however, was discovering that Musk’s use of AI to weigh and check facts was
suffering a more earth-bound problem. “Chatroom contributions are given equal
status with serious academic work,” Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, told
the Guardian, after being invited to test out Grokipedia. “AI just hoovers up
everything.”
He noted
its entry for Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and wartime munitions minister,
repeated lies and distortions spread by Speer even though they had been
corrected in a 2017 award-winning biography. The site’s entry on the Marxist
historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose biography Evans wrote, claimed wrongly he
experienced German hyperinflation in 1923, that he was an officer in the Royal
Corps of Signals and didn’t mention that he had been married twice, Evans said.
The
problem, said David Larsson Heidenblad, the deputy director of the Lund Centre
for the History of Knowledge in Sweden, was a clash of knowledge cultures.
“We live
in a moment where there is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is
more trustworthy than human-to-human insight,” Heidenblad said. “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. 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.”
Grokipedia’s
arrival continues a centuries-old encyclopedia tradition from the 15th-century
Chinese Yongle scrolls to the Encyclopédie, an engine for spreading
controversial enlightenment views in 18th-century France. These were followed
by the anglophone-centric Encyclopedia Britannica and, since 2001, the
crowd-sourced Wikipedia. But Grokipedia is the first to be largely created by
AI and this week a question swirled: who controls the truth when AIs, steered
by powerful individuals, are holding the pen?
“If it’s
Musk doing it then I am afraid of political manipulation,” said the cultural
historian Peter Burke, emeritus professor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who
in 2000 wrote A Social History of Knowledge since the time of Johannes
Gutenberg’s 15th-century printing press.
“I am
sure some of it will be overt to some readers, but the problem may be that
other readers may miss it,” Burke said. The anonymity of many encyclopedia
entries often gave them “an air of authority it shouldn’t have”, he added.
Andrew
Dudfield, the head of AI at Full Fact, a UK-based factchecking organisation,
said: “We really have to consider whether an AI-generated encyclopedia – a
facsimile of reality, run through a filter – is a better proposition than any
of the previous things that we have. It doesn’t display the same transparency
but it is asking for the same trust. 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. It
is hard to place trust in something when you can’t see how those choices are
made.”
Musk had
been encouraged to launch Grokipedia by, among others, Donald Trump’s tech
adviser, David Sacks, who complained Wikipedia was “hopelessly biased” and
maintained by “an army of leftwing activists”.
Until as
recently as 2021, Musk has supported Wikipedia, tweeting on its 20th birthday:
“So glad you exist.” But by October 2023 his antipathy towards the platform led
him to offer £1bn “if they change their name to Dickipedia”.
Yet many
of the 885,279 articles available on Grokipedia in its first week were lifted
almost word for word from Wikipedia, including its entries on the PlayStation
5, the Ford Focus and Led Zeppelin. Others, however, differed significantly:
Grokipedia’s
entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine cited the Kremlin as a prominent
source and quoted the official Russian terminology about “denazifying” Ukraine,
protecting ethnic Russians and neutralising threats to Russian security. By
contrast, Wikipedia said Putin espoused imperialist views and “baselessly
claimed that the Ukrainian government were neo-Nazis”.
Grokipedia
called the far-right organisation Britain First a “patriotic political party”,
which pleased its leader, Paul Golding, who in 2018 was jailed for anti-Muslim
hate crimes. Wikipedia, on the other hand, called it “neo-fascist” and a “hate
group”.
Grokipedia
called the 6 January 2021 turmoil at the US Capitol in Washington DC a “riot”,
not an attempted coup, and said there were “empirical underpinnings” to the
idea that a deliberate demographic erasure of white people in western nations
is being orchestrated through mass immigration. This is a notion that critics
consider to be a conspiracy theory.
Grokipedia
said Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records in the Stormy
Daniels hush-money case was handed down “after a trial in a heavily Democratic
jurisdiction”, and there was no mention of his conflicts of interest – for
example receiving a jet from Qatar or the Trump family cryptocurrency
businesses.
Wikipedia
responded coolly to the launch of Grokipedia, saying it was still trying to
understand how Grokipedia worked.
“Unlike
newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear,” a spokesperson for the
Wikimedia Foundation said. “It has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer
oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an
encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a
particular point of view.”
xAI did
not respond to requests for comment.
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