Elon Musk’s Grokipedia launches, filled to the brim with plagiarism and AI slop
Summary
Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia v0.1 — an imitation encyclopaedia that appears to contain hundreds of thousands of entries, many of which are directly adapted or copied from Wikipedia. The site reportedly hosts about 885,279 articles (roughly 12% of English Wikipedia’s size), and a number of pages explicitly carry the line “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons.” Beyond straight copying, Grokipedia shows heavy reliance on AI-generated content that skews presentation and amplifies selective narratives. Even Grok, Musk’s own chatbot, describes Grokipedia as “not a fair and unbiased source of information” and calls it “a critique wearing encyclopedia clothing.”
The Register and other outlets found verbatim lifts from Wikipedia and pages where attribution appears — raising questions about provenance, neutrality and how much the site actually improves on or diverges from Wikipedia.
Key Points
- Grokipedia launched as version 0.1 with ~885,279 articles; many pages appear adapted or copied from Wikipedia under Creative Commons.
- Several Grokipedia pages include the phrase “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons,” and some are near-verbatim copies of Wikipedia entries.
- In addition to copied content, Grokipedia contains AI-generated material that reviewers characterise as biased, selectively framed and factually messy — dubbed “AI slop.”
- Grok, the xAI chatbot, explicitly criticised Grokipedia’s framing and said it is not neutral in the encyclopaedic sense.
- The launch was delayed to “purge propaganda,” but critics say the site still amplifies Musk-aligned views about Wikipedia and ideological capture.
Why should I read this?
Short version: if you care about reliable information or use quick online reference sites, this matters. Grokipedia is being presented as an alternative to Wikipedia, yet it’s full of copied pages and AI-generated content that even the site’s own AI calls biased. Read this so you don’t accidentally cite something that looks like an encyclopedia but behaves like an opinion piece with patchy sourcing.
Context and relevance
This launch sits at the intersection of a few big trends: the reuse of crowd-sourced knowledge under Creative Commons licences, the rush to build AI-driven knowledge products, and high-profile attempts to create ideological alternatives to established reference sources. Legally, Creative Commons reuse is permitted with attribution and share-alike obligations, but the ethical and practical concerns here are about trust, editorial standards and how AI is used to generate and frame content.
For researchers, journalists, librarians and policy makers, Grokipedia is a test case: will AI-first encyclopaedias raise the bar on accuracy and transparency, or will they accelerate the spread of poorly-sourced, biased material that looks authoritative? Given that even Grok flags credibility issues, the prudent approach is scepticism and verification against established sources.