Elon Musk’s Grokipedia is a major own goal

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Just when you thought he must have run out of fingers to stick into pies, the world’s richest man goes and sprouts another one. This week Elon Musk proudly launched his latest venture — not electric cars, not space exploration, not satellites, not tunnels, not social media, not brain implants, not the rolling back of the administrative state, not a new political party, but something altogether more fundamental: a new version of the truth. 

“The goal here is to create an open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge,” Musk posted on X on Tuesday, a day after his xAI company rolled out its first 0.1 version of Grokipedia, an AI-powered online encyclopedia. “Then place copies of that etched in a stable oxide in orbit, the Moon and Mars to preserve it for the future. Foundation.” 

You know, because understandings of what is and isn’t true — and about how to capture the whole truth of a given subject — have famously always just been the kind of straightforward, uncomplicated and static thing that’s really well-suited to being etched on to something that cannot be changed and launched into space. Er, foundation. 

Musk, who has called Wikipedia, on which Grokipedia is modelled, “Wokepedia” and has described the site as “an extension of legacy media propaganda”, demonstrates a facile understanding of human knowledge. After all, even our best approximations of what is true are constantly shifting, as new facts and developments emerge, and as the values that shape our understanding change.

Does he have a point about some Wikipedia articles having a “liberal” or left-leaning bias that obscures or fails to provide a full and fair version of the truth, though? Yes. Just look up the “COVID-19 Lab leak theory” entry as an example. Despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans in a 2023 study by YouGov and the Economist said they believed the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory and not, as originally thought, a wet market, this is described in the second sentence as a “highly controversial” claim, while it is stated that “many scenarios proposed for a lab leak are characteristic of conspiracy theories” — as if there were not legitimate and non-conspiratorial reasons for believing in it. 

Indeed, last month one of the website’s two co-founders, Larry Sanger, wrote a long essay arguing that some of the standards that the site — which uses thousands of volunteer editors — was founded upon were being “sacrificed in favor of ideology”, and suggested nine ways to fix it. 

But funnily enough, none of Sanger’s suggestions included setting up an AI-powered, low-quality, barely readable Wikipedia rip-off with a peculiar penchant for Musk and his worldview. And yet that’s what we have in the shape of Grokipedia. 

Go and have a poke around in it and you will see what I mean. You will find Tommy Robinson described as a “citizen journalist” in glowing terms in the very first sentence of his entry. You will see Elon Musk’s 20lb weight loss highlighted in his entry as if that were important information, and you will find out that can be attributed to intermittent fasting (rather than to Mounjaro). You will read Kremlin talking points in the first paragraph of the entry on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, like the idea that the former is “denazifying” the latter. You might also be somewhat mystified — given its purported role in propagating legacy media propaganda — to find that, often, “content is adapted from Wikipedia”.

Instead of setting up a serious challenger to Wikipedia, Musk has scored a major own goal. Grokipedia demonstrates that, while humans might be highly imperfect, biased and tribal beings, they are still better than AI at getting to the truth (even when a majority of them have “liberal” biases) and it shows that, in a world in which stores of trust are so depleted, in which it’s so hard to know what’s real and what is fake, a site like Wikipedia is more important than ever.

Even Grok, the xAI chatbot the new site is named after, told me that “while Grokipedia improves on specific Wikipedia flaws — like verbose, overly critical entries on conservative topics — its AI gatekeeping creates a centralised ‘Musk’s truth’ filter, lacking Wikipedia’s distributed checks”, and that “it trades one set of biases for another, often with less accountability.”

Quite. But Musk’s crusades will surely continue. Actually, I’m quite surprised he hasn’t already set up his own AI-powered, tOtAlLy uNbIaSeD newspaper that automates all the wonderfully simple processes our industry has spent centuries honing, which he can then etch on to some stable oxide and propel into orbit too. Watch this (outer) space.

jemima.kelly@ft.com