Grokipedia Won't Destroy Knowledge, but it Might Divide Us More

Last month, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, his own artificial intelligence-generated alternative to Wikipedia he claims will “purge out the propaganda” in the latter. This followed three years of Musk attempting to discredit Wikipedia as so deeply biased as to have been “captured by the woke mind virus.”

These are false accusations. Academic studies suggest that Wikipedia falls in the center or at most leans moderately left in the context of United States politics, with articles becoming more neutral over time as more volunteers edit them. And, though Wikipedia considers some right-wing media as unreliable sources, right-leaning publications with strong fact-checking practices are considered reliable and left-wing sources need to meet the same standard.

Musk’s ambition appears to be to replace Wikipedia with a general-knowledge source that is favorable to his far-right views. This despite the fact that much of Grokipedia is actually copied from Wikipedia. Still, there is one key difference: Grokipedia articles cannot be edited by users, removing one of Wikipedia’s central mechanisms for detecting mistakes and converging to the truth.