Final month, tech billionaire Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-powered platform, to rival on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia.
“Grokipedia will exceed Wikipedia by a number of orders of magnitude in breadth, depth and accuracy,” Musk posted on X the day after his website went stay on October 27.
Really useful Tales
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Within the age of generative synthetic intelligence and AI-assisted search engines like google and yahoo, Wikipedia stays an data repository authored by people.
Grokipedia will exceed Wikipedia by a number of orders of magnitude in breadth, depth and accuracy https://t.co/Nt4M6vqEZu
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2025
But PolitiFact discovered Grokipedia’s articles are sometimes virtually fully lifted from Wikipedia. And when the entries differ, Grokipedia’s data high quality and sourcing are problematic and error-prone, making it a much less dependable analysis device.
Musk mentioned on an October 31 episode of the “All-In” tech and enterprise podcast that his group instructed his firm’s chatbot, Grok, to undergo the highest 1 million Wikipedia articles after which “add, modify and delete”.
“So which means analysis the remainder of the web, no matter is publicly obtainable, and proper the Wikipedia articles, repair errors, but additionally add much more context,” he mentioned on the podcast.
Grokipedia articles typically comprise the textual content “Truth-checked by Grok“.
PolitiFact reviewed Grokipedia articles and located that after they embody language that’s totally different from what appeared on Wikipedia, the brand new content material:
- Is just not supported by citations;
- Doesn’t present references; or
- Introduces deceptive or opinionated claims.
Grokipedia typically additionally removes context from its articles.
A pattern of Grokipedia’s 885,279 articles reveals they’re topic to the same AI-related phenomenon we first noticed in Might, previous to the device’s unveiling. Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr then launched a Make America Wholesome Once more report that contained a number of faulty citations, together with crediting sources that didn’t exist.
Joseph Reagle, Northeastern College affiliate professor of communication research, mentioned Grokipedia misunderstands Wikipedia’s and AI’s strengths.
“Wikipedia’s deserves are that it’s the results of a neighborhood of hundreds of individuals diligently working to create high-quality content material,” Reagle mentioned, whereas AI is helpful when it’s interactive and accepts pushback.
A whole bunch of hundreds of volunteers worldwide contribute content material to Wikipedia, guided by the platform’s editorial insurance policies and pointers.
The Wikimedia Basis, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, is conscious of Grokipedia’s copying downside.
“Even Grokipedia wants Wikipedia to exist,” mentioned Selena Decklemann, chief product and expertise officer on the Wikimedia Basis, in an announcement to PolitiFact. “Wikipedia’s content material is open supply by design; we count on it is going to be utilized in good religion to coach. This subject is very pressing as platforms like Grokipedia more and more draw on our articles, selectively extracting content material – written by hundreds of volunteers – and filtering it via opaque and unaccountable algorithms.”
Entries are practically equivalent, apart from incorrect or lacking references
We checked out Grokipedia articles overlaying numerous subjects together with science, music and economics. In lots of articles we reviewed, Grokipedia hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles with this assertion: “The content material is customized from Wikipedia, licensed beneath Inventive Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.”
Which means Wikipedia’s licensing permits Grokipedia to copy, redistribute and adapt the content material with an attribution. It additionally requires Grokipedia to provide the identical permissions for its tailored content material. (There are some articles that don’t copy from Wikipedia and don’t characteristic this assertion, such because the article for Joseph Stalin.)
Grokipedia’s article construction is much like Wikipedia’s, which options reference lists on the backside. However in some situations, Grokipedia copies Wikipedia articles whereas omitting their citations and reference lists.
Grokipedia’s article for “Monday,” for instance, contains details about the day of the week’s etymology, associated spiritual observances and cultural references. But it surely accommodates no citations aside from to say it was tailored from Wikipedia.
The Grokipedia article was a 96 % match of Wikipedia’s “Monday” article, in line with Copyscape, a plagiarism checker. The Wikipedia article, nonetheless, listed 22 references.
Typically Grokipedia botches citations. Within the entry for “culminating level,” Grokipedia cited the incorrect e-book chapter through which army theorist Carl von Clausewitz launched the idea. The remainder of the article textual content is copied from Wikipedia.
One article that differs considerably from its Wikipedia counterpart is the entry for “Good day”, a tune by British singer Adele. A number of objects within the Grokipedia reference listing are Instagram reels that present secondhand, unattributed data and commentary. Wikipedia’s requirements say such user-generated content material is “usually unacceptable as sources”.
Within the entry for the Canadian singer Feist, Grokipedia copied from Wikipedia however added a line saying her father died in Might 2021. The quotation led to Vice’s 2017 rating of the 60 greatest Canadian indie rock songs, an article that doesn’t point out the demise of Feist’s father, who was nonetheless alive that yr.
Grokipedia lacks transparency on correcting errors
PolitiFact discovered at the very least one occasion when Grokipedia launched misleading data.
The Grokipedia and Wikipedia articles for “Nobel Prize in Physics” are largely the identical, however one sentence Grokipedia added mentioned, “Physics is historically the primary award introduced within the Nobel Prize ceremony.” It didn’t present a quotation, and it seems to be incorrect: In at the very least the previous few years, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Drugs was awarded first.
“Not like Grokipedia, which depends on fast AI-generated content material with restricted transparency and oversight, Wikipedia’s processes are open to public assessment and rigorously doc the sources behind each article,” Decklemann mentioned.
Wikipedia permits anybody to contribute and edit articles, and ensures transparency by making the historical past of an article viewable. Some volunteers have superior permissions and are geared up to handle unfavorable behaviour on the platform.
Nonetheless, Wikipedia has come beneath scrutiny after an editor blocked changes to an article on the Gaza genocide web page.
On Grokipedia, registered customers can counsel edits to printed articles. However Grokipedia has no characteristic permitting readers to view what edits have been made. It’s unclear what occurs when there are errors – whether or not a human or Grok corrects them, how these modifications are deliberated, and the way lengthy it takes to replace pages.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
