Monday, Elon Musk’s xAI startup has launched Grokipedia, which the billionaire pitches as an AI-generated alternative to Wikipedia’s crowdsourced encyclopedia. Musk first announced the project in delayed September on his social media platform X, saying it would be a “tremendous advance over Wikipedia” and “a necessary step toward xAI’s goal of understanding the Universe.”
Last week, Musk said he delayed the launch of Grokipedia because his team needed to “put in more work to get rid of the propaganda.” When Grokipedia was finally taken down on Monday, WIRED was initially unable to access the site and received an automated message that it had been blocked.
When we finally gained access to it, WIRED discovered that the online encyclopedia contained extensive entries generated by artificial intelligence. Although many of the sites WIRED saw on launch day seemed quite similar to Wikipedia in tone and content, many notable Grokipedia entries condemned mainstream media, emphasized conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.
The Grokipedia entry on African American slavery in the U.S. includes a section outlining numerous “ideological justifications” created for slavery, including “The Transition from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.” The end of the entry focuses on criticism of the 1619 Project, which he argues wrongly framed “slavery as the primary engine of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural development.”
Entries about more recent historical events put conservative perspectives in the spotlight. When WIRED searched for “gay marriage” on Grokipedia, no entries came up, but one of the suggestions on the screen was for “gay pornography.” This Grokipedia entry falsely states that the spread of porn exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
“This marked the beginning of a devastating crisis that disproportionately affected the gay male community, where behaviors romanticized in porn – such as unprotected anal intercourse and multiple anonymous partners – were directly linked to major routes of transmission, leading to rapid rates of seroconversion,” the Grokipedia entry says.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Grokipedia entry for “transgender” contains two mentions of “transgender”, a term commonly used to describe denigrate trans people. The post also refers to transgender women as “biological men” who have “generated significant conflicts centered primarily around threats to women’s safety, privacy and gender-based protections established to mitigate male violence.” The first part pointed to social media as a potential “plague” that increases the number of transgender people.