Three years ago, Elon Musk had taken over Twitter to correct the left-leaning biases on the platform, and to make it more politically neutral. Now he’s looking to fix Wikipedia’s left-leaning bias as well.
Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has launched Grokipedia, which will be an unbiased alternative to Wikipedia. “The goal of Grok and Grokipedia is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will never be perfect, but we shall nonetheless strive towards that goal,” Musk said. “Grokipedia is fully open source, so anyone can use it for anything at no cost,” he added.
Grokipedia home page has a clean black interface with a single search bar. The encyclopedia mentions the number of articles it current has at the bottom — as of writing, Grokipedia has over 800,000 articles. Users can put in their queries into the search bar, and they’re then directed to the articles. The articles themselves seem much like Wikipedia’s in terms of style and substance including citations, but with a crucial difference — as opposed to Wikipedia only catering to left-leaning talking points, Grokipedia presents a balanced perspective and shows both sides of an issue. Grokipedia’s articles, for now, seem to have no pictures, but this could likely be changed in the coming months.
Wikipedia has long been criticized for the far-left bias in its articles. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has long been talking about how Wikipedia has been taken over by left-leaning activist editors who create biased articles that are impossible to fix. Sanger has said that the site has a become ‘propaganda’ for the left-leaning establishment. “If only one version (left-leaning) of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power,” he has said. Sanger is no longer with Wikipedia, and it is now controlled by its other co-founder, Jimmy Wales.
Elon Musk has been training his guns on Wikipedia for a while. In 2020, he’d tweeted that history was written by the victors, except on Wikipedia, implying that the people editing Wikipedia were losers. In 2022, he tweeted that Wikipedia had a “non trivial” left wing bias. In 2023, Musk had said that he’d give Wikipedia a billion dollars it changed its name to ‘Dickipedia’ over its left-leaning bias. Musk has also questioned the constant donations that Wikipedia keeps asking its users. Musk also wondered why Wikipedia was always asking users for donations. “Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It certainly isn’t needed to operate Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone! So, what’s the money for? Inquiring minds want to know,” he had posted.
Musk now seems to have taken matters into his own hands, and has started a Wikipedia competitor in Grokipedia. Writing an encyclopedia seems like the perfect use-case for AI — Wikipedia editors manually search through published material to create their articles, and this is something AI already excels at. The biggest challenge, though, will be to sift through what’s true and what’s not — there are a lot more left-leaning publications than right-leaning publications, and Grok will not only need to find primary sources, but also decide on how much relative importance to give to each of them. But given how Grok also has access to X, which is the town square of the world since Musk took over, one can be reasonably hopeful that Grokipedia will be able to eliminate Wikipedia’s biases and create a more neutral encyclopedia for the world.