The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people.
Elon Musk’s xAI just launched Grokipedia, an AI-written encyclopedia with about 885,000 articles at version 0.1, compared to Wikipedia’s 7+ million English articles. Musk says Wikipedia is full of “propaganda” and left-wing bias, and he’s pitching Grokipedia as the fix. But reporters quickly found that many Grokipedia pages are copied nearly word-for-word from Wikipedia, with only a small notice saying they were “adapted,” and in other places the AI rewrites things to match Musk’s politics.
Where Grokipedia doesn’t just copy, it leans hard into right-wing framing. Its entry on U.S. slavery spends time defending pro-slavery ideology and attacks The 1619 Project for saying slavery was central to American politics and economics, which echoes conservative backlash against that project. On LGBTQ topics it’s even more aggressive: searching “gay marriage” doesn’t return “gay marriage” at all, but suggests “gay pornography,” and that article falsely blames porn for worsening the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s by encouraging unsafe sex among gay men.
The treatment of trans people also mirrors current far-right talking points. The “transgender” article uses language like “transgenderism,” calls trans women “biological males,” and frames trans inclusion mainly as a danger to “women’s safety, privacy, and sex-based protections,” implying that trans people are a threat. It also pushes the idea that social media is acting like a “contagion” that spreads being trans, which is a common narrative in anti-trans activism and not how medical orgs describe gender identity.
Grokipedia constantly attacks mainstream media and elevates Musk and his allies. The entry on WIRED accuses the magazine of becoming “far-left wing propaganda” and claims the media in general has a “systemic leftward lean.” Coverage of Donald Trump complains that CNN and The New York Times are biased against Republicans and excuses the shutdown fight as “bipartisan failures.” Meanwhile, Musk’s own page is enormous (about 11,000 words, vs under 8,000 on Wikipedia) and includes sections praising his fights against “woke culture” and regulation. The site even nudges search suggestions that flatter Musk while highlighting drama around rivals like OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Read the full Wired article: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-launches-grokipedia-wikipedia-competitor/
Grokipedia can be accessed at https://grokipedia.com
Other outlets:
- NYTimes (unpaywalled): www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/technology/grokipedia-launch-elon-musk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.w08.9UiO.PznF2qx0FDQo&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
- Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-launches-grokipedia-xai-wikipedia-competitor-2025-10
- The Verge on Grokipedia copying Wikipedia articles: https://www.theverge.com/news/807686/elon-musk-grokipedia-launch-wikipedia-xai-copied
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