It’s easy to make fun of Elon Musk’s latest vanity project: attempting to replace Wikipedia as the online encyclopedia of choice with his Grokipedia—created in the past few months by his AI chatbot (and wildly sycophantic Musk fan) Grok.
Musk has been a long-time critic of Wikipedia, the remarkable volunteer-authored project that serves as a shared anchor for what’s factual in a disputed and partisan world. He doesn’t see things that way, calling it “Wokepedia” and telling his supporters not to give to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.
Apparently, the billionaire’s breaking point was an entry asserting that “Elon Musk twice made a salute interpreted by many as a Nazi or a fascist Roman salute” at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration this year—something he denies.
This battle over who gets to determine the truth is nothing new. Take the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, better known as “Diderot’s Encyclopedia”. Published in multiple volumes from 1751 onwards, it contained thousands of entries from around 150 named contributors, including leaders of the French Enlightenment such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It included articles that criticised the monarchy and the Catholic Church, and was suspended from publication by order of King Louis XV in 1752 for “destroying royal authority” and “fomenting a spirit of independence and revolt”. To continue the project, the editors claimed to be publishing in Neuchâtel, safely across the Swiss border, though work continued in secret in Paris.
In truth, the politics of the Encyclopédie ranged from the radical to the orthodox, with many articles by mainstream theologians. What may have been most radical about it was the juxtaposing of differing perspectives within a single body of knowledge. The scholar Andrew Curran suggests the encyclopedia’s very structure centred such juxtaposition by presenting topics alphabetically, thereby not recognising a hierarchy in which certain types of knowledge—notably that about Christianity—were viewed as superior.
Not all encyclopedias welcome a diversity of views. In the last century, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published from 1926, was devised to “show the superiority of socialist culture over the culture of the capitalist world”, as “the first Marxist–Leninist general-purpose encyclopedia”. After the USSR fell in 1990, it morphed into the Great Russian Encyclopedia, which has since become source material for Ruwiki—a pro-Russian “fork” of Wikipedia. Forks, allowed under Wikipedia’s rules, use its open-source material as a template for their own entries.
Grokipedia is also a Wiki fork, while Grok itself is heavily dependent on Wikipedia for training data, as are virtually all large language models. Musk has acknowledged this, declaring that Grokipedia would “purge out the propaganda”. In some cases, this purge is easy to spot: Grokipedia has an article titled “Great Replacement theory” which, compared to Wikipedia’s on the “Great Replacement conspiracy theory”, is vastly more sympathetic to Renaud Camus’s ethnonationalist paranoia.
But rather than look for further examples of how Grokipedia might reflect Musk’s views, I did something more self-indulgent: I searched for myself. Grokipedia turned up an extremely flattering, extensive article almost five times as long as my Wikipedia entry, at nearly 5,000 words. And while I was sorely tempted to conclude it had simply recognised my genius and importance, the reasons for the variance are worth exploring.
Like most writers, I am not in fact very important, and yet there’s a great deal of information about me online, mostly from me. For more than 20 years, I’ve shared ideas and news on a weblog. Wikipedia does not view these writings as reliable sources of information about me: it discourages use of “self-sourcing”, and provides detailed guidelines about what limited claims can be accepted based on my say-so. But for Grokipedia, self-published and self-sourced material appears to be preferred to content from “biased” sources, like mainstream news organisations.
This helps explain why 23 of the 98 citations on my Grokipedia page refer to my personal website, while only three of the 29 citations on my Wikipedia page do the same. I am not much written about in news media or scholarly journals—primary sources for Wikipedia—giving Wikipedians less to work with. But an AI tasked with creating an encyclopedia entry on me (likely because such an article exists in Wikipedia) will happily generate prose at a length just below the threshold at which Wikipedia encourages editors to subdivide an article.
While I’m the beneficiary of Grokipedia’s largesse, the goal is not to reward the prolix and the irrelevant. As encyclopedia researcher Ryan McGrady (who is also a friend, colleague and frequent coauthor) observes, the aim of Grokipedia is to achieve neutrality where “neutrality is whatever Elon Musk says is neutral”.
Because Grokipedia takes a person’s self-published assertions as a valid primary source, Musk’s statements about his own views and motivations can supersede media reporting about him. And when Musk believes “mainstream media” is biased against certain points of view, articles can cite primary sources and interpret them in a way that promotes a contrarian perspective. Wikipedia strongly discourages editors from providing personal interpretation of primary documents, asking them to rely on established scholarship.
But while Grokipedia gives more credence to individual accounts, it seeks to erase individual voices in other ways.
Diderot’s Encyclopédie encouraged contributors to claim their ideas and labour, a decision that directly mirrored Enlightenment values on the primacy of individual agency and reason. It was a collection of expert perspectives as much as a reference book, not a top-down assertion of “the truth”.
Wikipedia shares this spirit. It is one of the most remarkable products of an age of participatory media, where millions of contributors have created a collective resource. Their disagreements and conflicts—visible through the histories and “talk pages” associated with each article—are the magic that enables Wikipedia’s reliability. Overly partisan takes on an issue are likely to be countered by a rival perspective. Maintaining a “Neutral Point of View” is one of Wikipedia’s core principles, along with verifiability and “no original research”. The neutrality is established by creating content that is sufficiently fair and unbiased to survive challenges from multiple viewpoints.
By contrast, the only entity that can edit Grokipedia is Grok. My entry included an error: it hallucinated the subtitle of my first book. Registering for Grokipedia, I was able to suggest a change and provide a citation, but Grok had to fact-check it and make the change itself. The complex interpersonal work of establishing consensus is downgraded at the expense of maintaining Grok’s singular voice.
The irony is that generative AIs like Grok are profoundly dependent on the creativity of individual authors, as they are trained on blogs, forums and collaborative projects like Wikipedia. But in so doing large language models erase individual identity, and with it the biases inherent within our perspectives and the work necessary to bring something new into the world. All contributions are reduced to data to train the model.
The participatory age of the internet—an age of blogs, social media and user-generated video—is being challenged by generative AI. The search engines that index participatory content, so that users can find it, are losing ground—sometimes within their own products—to AI bots that answer questions instead of directing us to an individual’s writing.
Grokipedia, as an encyclopedia designed to reflect an explicitly political point of view, recalls the pre-Enlightenment encyclopedias that blurred the voices of contributors and editors into one voice blessed by the church or the monarch. Instead of taking us forwards, it promises a backward-looking dystopia where one conspiracy-minded individual can overturn established knowledge, and where all other individual voices eventually blur into one opaque voice.
