Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-powered version of Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia, which started on Monday, October 27, aims to remove what Musk refers to as “the propaganda” found on Wikipedia, according to a post on his X social media site. It takes its name from Grok, the AI chatbot behind Musk’s xAI startup.
Grokipedia launched by xAI
Musk has described Wikipedia as “woke” and criticized it for citing media outlets like The New York Times and NPR in many of its articles. As of early Tuesday morning, October 28, Grokipedia had 885,279 AI-written entries, compared to over 7 million entries created by humans in English on Wikipedia. If other languages are included, that number exceeds 22 million.
Musk announced plans for this project on X late last month, claiming it would be “a massive improvement over Wikipedia.” He wrote, “Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
Wikipedia users visit dropped by 8%
A report by the New York Times notes that visits to Wikipedia by human users have dropped 8% this year, while visits from AI scrapers have increased. AI summaries provided by search engines and chatbots are also reducing the number of people using Wikipedia, according to the report.
Selena Deckelmann, the chief technology officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, told the Times, “People will take information they get from these tools at face value, and that information may or may not be correct. The value Wikipedia has provided for over a decade is that it lets people dig into the sources.”
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