Billionaire Elon Musk has launched a new AI-generated site to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which he has accused of being “extremely left-biased”.
The site, named Grokipedia, had more than 885,000 articles by Monday evening, compared to Wikipedia’s more than seven million in English.
The launch came with the promise of a newer version, 1.0, which Mr Musk said would be “10X better” than the current live site.
“The goal of Grok and Grokipedia.com is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will never be perfect, but we shall nonetheless strive towards that goal,” he said on X following the launch
Grokipedia’s release had been marked for the end of September, but was delayed by the US entrepreneur to “purge out the propaganda,” Mr Musk said in a separate X post.
Mr Musk, who recently became the the world’s first half-trillionaire, has been a regular critic of Wikipedia.
In 2024 he accused the site of being “controlled by far-left activists” and called for donations to the platform to cease.
Grokipedia’s content is generated by artificial intelligence and the generative AI assistant Grok.
A Grokipedia article about Mr Musk states that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has “influenced broader debates on technological progress, demographic decline, and institutional biases, often via X,” amid what the page says are “criticisms from legacy media outlets that exhibit systemic left-leaning tilts in coverage”
In an age of polarisation and AI, the free online encyclopedia’s very existence could be at stake.
Created in 2001, Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia managed by volunteers, largely funded by donations, and whose pages can be written or edited by internet users.
“Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement,” a spokeswoman from Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement to the AFP.
It claims the site is written to inform “billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view”.
When asked about the launch of Grokipedia, the spokeswoman said Wikimedia is “still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works”.
She highlighted that Wikimedia “is — and always will be — human”.
“This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content, even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” she said.
The birth of Grokipedia has been welcomed by several right-wing figures, including hardline Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin.
Mr Dugin described the Grokipedia article about him as “neutral, objective, accurate” whereas Wikipedia’s page, according to him, is “totally biased and defamatory”.
AFP
