Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points
On Monday, Elon of Musk Starting xAI launched Grokipedia, where the billionaire is pitching as an AI-generated alternative to the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Musk first announced the project in late September on his social media platform X, saying it would be “a massive improvement over Wikipedia,” and “a necessary step toward the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
Musk said last week that he had delayed Grokipedia's launch because his team “needed to do more work to clean out the propaganda.” When Grokipedia finally went down on Monday, WIRED was initially unable to access the website and received an automated message that it had been blocked.
When we finally got access to it, WIRED found that the online encyclopedia contained long entries generated by AI. While many of the pages WIRED saw on launch day were quite similar to Wikipedia in terms of tone and content, a number of notable Grokipedia entries scorned the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes maintained historical inaccuracies.
Grokipedia's entry on the slavery of African Americans in the US includes a section that many “ideological justifications“made for slavery, including the “shift from necessary evil to positive good.” The end of the entry focuses on criticism of The 1619 Project, which it says wrongly framed “slavery as the central engine of the political, economic and cultural development of the nation.”
Entries for more recent historical events put conservative perspectives at the center. When WIRED searched for “gay marriage” in Grokipedia, no entry came up, but one of the suggestions on the screen was for “gay pornography” instead. This entry in Grokipedia falsely states that the proliferation of pornography increased the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
“This marked the beginning of what would become a devastating crisis that disproportionately affected gay male communities, where behaviors idealized in pornography – such as unprotected receptive anal intercourse and multiple anonymous partners – directly aligned with primary transmission routes, leading to rapid seroconversion rates,” claims Grokipedia's entry.
xAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Grokipedia entry for “transgender” includes two mentions of “transgenderism”, a term commonly used to describe denigrate trans people. The entry also refers to trans women as “biological men” who “have generated significant controversy, primarily centered on risks to women's safety, privacy, and sex-based protections established to limit male violence.” The opening section highlights social media as a potential “contagion” that increases the number of trans people.
