On October 27, 2025, the digital knowledge landscape witnessed a seismic shift as Elon Musk’s xAI company unveiled Grokipedia, an AI-powered online encyclopedia that Musk himself described as “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.” The launch, which saw Grokipedia debut with 885,279 articles, immediately reignited debates over bias, transparency, and the very nature of knowledge creation in the internet age.
Grokipedia’s arrival was anything but subtle. Marketed as a “more truthful alternative to Wikipedia,” the new platform entered the fray with bold claims and a substantial article base, though not without controversy. According to NBC News and PEOPLE, Grokipedia’s launch was marred by technical hiccups, including a website crash and a week-long delay. Even more contentious was the revelation that many of its articles were copied nearly verbatim from Wikipedia, with some entries explicitly disclaiming their adaptation under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. As the Wikimedia Foundation pointedly noted, “This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”
The differences between Grokipedia and Wikipedia run deep, both structurally and philosophically. Wikipedia, launched in 2001 by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, boasts over 7 million English articles, more than 122,000 active volunteer editors, and a transparent, consensus-driven editing process. Its funding model relies on grassroots donations, totaling $185.35 million in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, and its policies emphasize neutrality, rigorous oversight, and open collaboration. “Wikipedia is still the internet we were promised—created by people, not by machines. It’s not perfect, but it’s not here to push a point of view,” read a fundraising alert on Wikipedia’s homepage the day after Grokipedia’s launch.
By contrast, Grokipedia is a for-profit venture under xAI, with content generated entirely by artificial intelligence and corrections suggested through user feedback forms rather than direct editing. Its revenue model remains unclear as of October 31, 2025, and, despite Musk’s assertion that “Grokipedia.com is fully open source, so anyone can use it for anything at no cost,” there is no publicly accessible source code repository for the backend. The platform supports only English at launch, offers limited media integration, and, crucially, provides sparse citations—sometimes as few as two sources on topics where Wikipedia lists over a hundred.
Musk’s motivations for launching Grokipedia are rooted in his longstanding criticisms of Wikipedia. While he once expressed admiration for the platform, by 2022 he was publicly accusing it of “losing its objectivity” and, in December 2024, called for a boycott of donations, derisively labeling it “Wokipedia.” On September 30, 2025, Musk announced Grokipedia on X (formerly Twitter), declaring it a “massive improvement over Wikipedia.” He doubled down on this stance after David Sacks, Trump’s “AI and Crypto Czar,” argued at the All-In Podcast conference that Wikipedia’s knowledge base was “so biased, it’s a constant war.”
But does Grokipedia actually solve the bias problem, or does it merely shift it? Early reviews from The Verge, Rolling Stone, and other outlets suggest the latter. Analyses documented that Grokipedia presents conspiracy theories, such as Pizzagate and the Great Replacement, as factual events, and frames the white genocide theory “as an event that is occurring.” On topics like vaccines, COVID-19, and climate change, Grokipedia’s entries often diverge from mainstream scientific consensus. Science fiction author John Scalzi, after reading his own Grokipedia entry, found factual errors and a disproportionate emphasis on conservative criticism. The broader pattern, as many experts note, is that AI systems tend to replicate the biases inherent in their training data, while making the editorial process less transparent.
Wikipedia, for its part, has not been immune to criticism—or to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Founder Jimmy Wales has acknowledged the platform’s imperfections but stands by its core principles. “We don’t treat random crackpots the same as The New England Journal of Medicine and that doesn’t make us woke,” Wales said at the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City. He further argued, “They’re just unhappy that Wikipedia doesn’t report on their fringe views as being mainstream. And that, by the way, goes across all kinds of fields.” Wales also highlighted the growing issue of well-meaning editors unknowingly adding AI-generated fake sources, recounting an incident on German Wikipedia where a contributor used ChatGPT to fabricate references. “Of course, ChatGPT had made them up absolutely from scratch,” Wales recounted at SXSW London.
The Wikimedia Foundation, in a statement to PEOPLE, emphasized that Wikipedia’s “strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement.” The organization added, “Wikipedia’s knowledge is—and always will be—human. Through open collaboration and consensus, people from all backgrounds build a neutral, living record of human understanding—one that reflects our diversity and collective curiosity.”
Yet the battle lines are not drawn solely between Wikipedia and Grokipedia. The launch of competing encyclopedias is part of a broader trend of ideological polarization across digital platforms. The evolution of Twitter into X, for example, has shown how a few algorithmic tweaks can radically alter information dissemination. After the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt on Donald Trump, nine right-wing “newsbroker” accounts on X garnered 1.2 million reposts in three days, compared to just 98,064 for nine traditional news outlets—despite the latter having much larger followings and posting twice as often. Meanwhile, over a million users joined Bluesky in the week following the 2024 U.S. election, deepening political silos as left-leaning users migrated away from X and Meta.
This phenomenon, sometimes called “political migration,” has the potential to fragment not just social media but the very foundations of shared knowledge. If users abandon one platform due to perceived bias, the remaining community may become even more ideologically homogenous, accelerating the drift toward information silos. As Jimmy Wales observed, the best response to criticism is “doubling down on being neutral and being really careful about sources”—advice that applies equally to human and AI-curated platforms.
The stakes are high. In an era where a well-optimized falsehood can outcompete a poorly promoted truth, critical thinking becomes paramount. Drawing on the late Carl Sagan’s principles—independent confirmation, skepticism toward authority, consideration of multiple hypotheses, and the willingness to test and challenge one’s own ideas—remains as relevant as ever. The real question, perhaps, is not whether Wikipedia or Grokipedia is more trustworthy, but whether the proliferation of algorithmically curated knowledge will fragment our shared reality into sealed, self-reinforcing echo chambers.
As philosopher Terence McKenna once mused, “The felt presence of immediate experience, this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.” In a world where anyone can edit reality, the responsibility to check the footnotes—and to think critically—has never been greater.
