Did Elon Musk's Grokipedia Copy Wikipedia? Here's The Truth
Developed by Elon Musk's company xAI, Grokipedia went live on Monday as an early prototype.
Elon Musk’s new AI-powered encyclopedia, Grokipedia, has come under scrutiny after users discovered that several of its pages appear to be copied directly from Wikipedia, the very platform it was built to challenge.
Developed by Musk’s company xAI, Grokipedia went live on Monday as an early prototype, version 0.1, and is being billed as an AI-driven alternative to Wikipedia.
Despite Musk’s repeated claims that Grokipedia would be a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia, many of its pages appear to rely heavily on it. For instance, at the bottom of the MacBook Air entry a message reads, "The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License."
The same text appears on pages about the Lincoln Mark VIII car and the PlayStation 5, which are nearly identical, word-for-word and line-for-line, to their Wikipedia versions.
"Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist," said Lauren Dickinson, spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia.
In some areas, Grokipedia’s entries differ from Wikipedia’s not in form but in tone. The climate change article, for example, appears to play down scientific consensus.
Wikipedia’s version says, "There is a nearly unanimous scientific consensus that the climate is warming and that this is caused by human activities. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view."
Grokipedia says, “Critics contend that claims of near-unanimous scientific consensus on anthropogenic causes dominating recent climate change overstate agreement due to selective categorization in literature reviews.”
It also claims that the media and groups such as Greenpeace contribute to "heightened public alarm" and participate in "coordinated efforts to frame the issue as an existential imperative".
The website’s layout is also the same as Wikipedia’s minimalist design. It has a large search bar on the homepage and plain text entries with headings, subheadings, and citations.
Unlike Wikipedia, though, Grokipedia currently restricts editing. An “edit” button appears on only a few pages and, when clicked, displays previously completed changes without revealing who made them or allowing users to suggest new ones.
Each entry also carries a note claiming that Grok, xAI’s chatbot, has “fact-checked” the information, along with a timestamp for when this occurred.
Earlier this month, Musk acknowledged that his AI chatbot Grok’s responses often drew from Wikipedia pages, telling an X user, "we should have this fixed by end of year."
