In Grok we don't trust Is Musk's AI encyclopedia really reliable? Academics have doubts

From publishing falsehoods to pushing far-right ideology, Grokipedia gives chatroom comments equal status to research

- Robert Booth

The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving, studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck's social policy.

That was some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched last month by the world's richest person, Elon Musk. The problem was, as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these facts were false.

It was part of a choppy start for humanity's latest attempt to corral the sum of human knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" - all revealed through the magic of his Grok artificial intelligence model.

When the multibillionaire switched on Grokipedia on 27 October, he said it was "better than Wikipedia", or "Wokepedia" as his supporters call it, reflecting a view that the dominant online encyclopedia often reflects leftwing talking points. One post on X caught the triumphant mood among Musk's fans: "Elon just killed Wikipedia. Good riddance."

But users found Grokipedia lifted large chunks from the website it intended to usurp, contained numerous factual errors and seemed to promote Musk's favoured rightwing talking points. In between posts on X promoting his creation, Musk last week declared "civil war in Britain is inevitable", called for the English "to ally with the hard men" such as the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and said only the Alternative für Deutschland party could "save Germany".

Musk was so enamoured of his AI-encyclopedia he said he planned to one day etch the "comprehensive collection of all knowledge" into a stable oxide and "place copies ... in orbit, the moon and Mars to preserve it for the future".