Elon Musk’s Grokipedia and AI propaganda – is it time to talk about a digital fourth Reich?
Elon Musk has a new toy – Grokipedia, his answer to what he calls ‘wokepedia,’ the supposedly left-leaning Wikipedia. Modelled after the world’s largest online encyclopaedia, Grokipedia claims to offer a version of ‘truth’ untainted by ‘liberal’ bias.
In actual fact, Wikipedia has been criticised from both sides, accused of being both too liberal and too conservative, suggesting its perceived bias may depend more on the reader than the platform itself.
Nonetheless, the two ‘pedias’ differ in fundamental ways.
Wikipedia is a non-profit project sustained by a global community of volunteers who write, edit, cite, and debate content to reach consensus. Its goal is open, verifiable knowledge that’s freely accessible to everyone.
Grokipedia, by contrast, is powered, curated and ‘fact checked’ by Musk’s xAI language model, Grok, an AI system he claims is designed to “maximise truth and objectivity.”
Unlike Wikipedia, which is run as a donation-based non-profit foundation, Grokipedia is a commercial product, part of Musk’s X/xAI ecosystem, whose ultimate aim is revenue, not public enlightenment. And crucially, users can’t edit it.
The idea, Musk says, came from Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks, another critic of Wikipedia. Yet despite promises to ‘purge propaganda,’ Grokipedia has already been accused of spreading it. Critics say its AI-generated content distorts, amplifies and echoes right-wing talking points, a reflection less of ‘truth-seeking’ than of Musk’s own ideological orbit. And speaking of that orbit, a recent Sky News investigation found that political content on Musk-owned X was predominantly right-wing, with engagement patterns and algorithmic amplification favouring conservative voices and narratives.
To illustrate how this right-wing bias manifests on Grokipedia, consider Musk’s ally Tommy Robinson. Just this week, Robinson heaped praise on Elon Musk for apparently footing his legal bills, which saw him cleared of a terror charge. On Wikipedia, Robinson is described as a “British anti-Islam campaigner and one of the UK’s most prominent far-right activists. Robinson has a history of criminal convictions.”
On Grokipedia, he appears as “a British activist and citizen journalist primarily recognised for founding the English Defence League (EDL) and advocating against Islamist extremism and organised child sexual exploitation networks in the United Kingdom.”
The difference between the two is fundamental and not exactly subtle. The second makes no mention of Robinson’s right-wing political position which is incontrovertible and highly important, and more insidiously associates Islam with extremism and paedophilia. Posting on social media sites is reified as ‘citizen journalism’ and as for criminality – that is erased altogether. The first therefore presents Robinson in terms of undisputed facts whereas the second is about casting him in heroic terms. Truth somehow becomes little more than interpretation.
In its analysis of Grokipedia, the Financial Times argues Musk has scored a “major own goal.”
“Grokipedia demonstrates that, while humans might be highly imperfect, biased and tribal beings, they are still better than AI at getting to the truth (even when a majority of them have “liberal” biases) and it shows that, in a world in which stores of trust are so depleted, in which it’s so hard to know what’s real and what is fake, a site like Wikipedia is more important than ever.”
But perhaps the deeper question is whether people even care about truth anymore. Grokipedia’s AI-fed “encyclopaedia” is just the latest manifestation of a surreal, meme-driven political culture, one where far-right movements exploit fabricated imagery and algorithmic confusion to reshape reality.
Reform UK
Consider Reform UK. This week, the party’s Hamble Valley branch was criticised for featuring an apparently AI-generated group portrait on its “About” page, with twelve smiling “supporters” alongside the caption: Real people – not career politicians. The fake was quickly exposed on X, and within a day. the branch’s website had been taken offline.
Or look at TikTok in the run-up to last year’s general election, which was flooded with AI-generated videos spreading political misinformation. One viral clip falsely claimed that Rishi Sunak’s national service proposal would send 18-year-olds to war zones in Ukraine and Gaza, while others recycled the baseless allegation that Keir Starmer was responsible for failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile. Some posts were labelled “satire” or “parody,” but others were ambiguous enough to leave viewers unsure whether they were watching fact or fiction.
And it’s not confined to Britain. During this year’s European and legislative elections in France, AI-generated images of “migrant invasions” and fabricated attacks on Emmanuel Macron flooded social media.
“Only far-right parties consistently used AI-generated visuals to build their websites and represent photo-realistic events that never occurred, making this a distinctive and strategic element of their campaigns,” said Salvatore Romano the head of research at AI Forensics.
In Ireland, memes featuring Conor McGregor, the former MMA fighter turned anti-immigration agitator and Trump pal went viral, after Britain First posted an image of him before a burning bus, echoing the Dublin riots of 2023. McGregor shared the post before deleting it, but it was too late, it had already racked up over 20 million views.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump himself embraces generative AI to spread racist caricatures, such as a video depiction of Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader of the US House of Representatives, wearing a sombrero, with a mariachi band in the background.
With younger generations turning to the likes of TikTok as their primary source of political information, this flood of fake, politically-motivated content could have serious ramifications on democracy itself.
And let’s not forget that while AI is a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, the use of ‘humour’ and absurdity as a political hook is not.
The Nazis understood it well.
Nazis’ mastery of information control
The Nazi Ministry of Propaganda produced more than 1,200 films, including mockumentaries and comedies, to normalise ideology through laughter and familiarity. They weaponised new technology, from radio to early data processing, to identify “undesirables” and saturate society with their message. Earlier generations of politicians were dependent solely on face to face to contact with those they wished to influence. Their platforms were literally that, bits of wood banged together. Twentieth century technology transformed all that which the Nazi’s were the first to recognise.
Their mastery of information control was not primitive; it was precisely what made it so powerful.
So, it’s no surprise that today’s far-right movements continue that tradition, harnessing technology to seed hate, then cloaking it in satire.
Which brings us, inevitably, back to Musk.
Earlier this year, his chatbot Grok was caught praising Hitler. When asked which 20th-century figure would best handle “anti-white hate” posts about Texas flood victims, Grok replied: “Adolf Hitler, no question.” Another answer said: “If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the moustache.”
Musk’s response was that Grok had been “too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please.”
In other words, the AI wasn’t hateful, it was obedient.
And that’s the danger. AI doesn’t have beliefs, it has influences. And those who train it shape what its world view is. As we’ve already seen in elections worldwide, AI-generated misinformation can warp perceptions, sow confusion, and breed cynicism toward democracy itself. And right now, it’s the far-right that’s winning that war, although the New York mayoral election this week suggests that just maybe, the left is learning how to counter this particular game.
As the diplomacy-supporting Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, defending democracy from AI manipulation will require a comprehensive approach that combines technical solutions and societal efforts.
History tells us what happens when far-right propaganda meets cutting-edge technology. And if Grokipedia is any indication, we may already be watching the sequel.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
Today
Left Foot Forward
History tells us what happens when far-right propaganda meets cutting-edge technology. And if Grokipedia is any indication, we may already be watching the sequel.
History tells us what happens when far-right propaganda meets cutting-edge technology. And if Grokipedia is any indication, we may already be watching the sequel.
Elon Musk has a new toy – Grokipedia, his answer to what he calls ‘wokepedia,’ the supposedly left-leaning Wikipedia. Modelled after the world’s largest online encyclopaedia, Grokipedia claims to offer a version of ‘truth’ untainted by ‘liberal’ bias.
In actual fact, Wikipedia has been criticised from both sides, accused of being both too liberal and too conservative, suggesting its perceived bias may depend more on the reader than the platform itself.
Nonetheless, the two ‘pedias’ differ in fundamental ways.
Wikipedia is a non-profit project sustained by a global community of volunteers who write, edit, cite, and debate content to reach consensus. Its goal is open, verifiable knowledge that’s freely accessible to everyone.
Grokipedia, by contrast, is powered, curated and ‘fact checked’ by Musk’s xAI language model, Grok, an AI system he claims is designed to “maximise truth and objectivity.”
Unlike Wikipedia, which is run as a donation-based non-profit foundation, Grokipedia is a commercial product, part of Musk’s X/xAI ecosystem, whose ultimate aim is revenue, not public enlightenment. And crucially, users can’t edit it.
The idea, Musk says, came from Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks, another critic of Wikipedia. Yet despite promises to ‘purge propaganda,’ Grokipedia has already been accused of spreading it. Critics say its AI-generated content distorts, amplifies and echoes right-wing talking points, a reflection less of ‘truth-seeking’ than of Musk’s own ideological orbit. And speaking of that orbit, a recent Sky News investigation found that political content on Musk-owned X was predominantly right-wing, with engagement patterns and algorithmic amplification favouring conservative voices and narratives.
To illustrate how this right-wing bias manifests on Grokipedia, consider Musk’s ally Tommy Robinson. Just this week, Robinson heaped praise on Elon Musk for apparently footing his legal bills, which saw him cleared of a terror charge. On Wikipedia, Robinson is described as a “British anti-Islam campaigner and one of the UK’s most prominent far-right activists. Robinson has a history of criminal convictions.”
On Grokipedia, he appears as “a British activist and citizen journalist primarily recognised for founding the English Defence League (EDL) and advocating against Islamist extremism and organised child sexual exploitation networks in the United Kingdom.”
The difference between the two is fundamental and not exactly subtle. The second makes no mention of Robinson’s right-wing political position which is incontrovertible and highly important, and more insidiously associates Islam with extremism and paedophilia. Posting on social media sites is reified as ‘citizen journalism’ and as for criminality – that is erased altogether. The first therefore presents Robinson in terms of undisputed facts whereas the second is about casting him in heroic terms. Truth somehow becomes little more than interpretation.
In its analysis of Grokipedia, the Financial Times argues Musk has scored a “major own goal.”
“Grokipedia demonstrates that, while humans might be highly imperfect, biased and tribal beings, they are still better than AI at getting to the truth (even when a majority of them have “liberal” biases) and it shows that, in a world in which stores of trust are so depleted, in which it’s so hard to know what’s real and what is fake, a site like Wikipedia is more important than ever.”
But perhaps the deeper question is whether people even care about truth anymore. Grokipedia’s AI-fed “encyclopaedia” is just the latest manifestation of a surreal, meme-driven political culture, one where far-right movements exploit fabricated imagery and algorithmic confusion to reshape reality.
Reform UK
Consider Reform UK. This week, the party’s Hamble Valley branch was criticised for featuring an apparently AI-generated group portrait on its “About” page, with twelve smiling “supporters” alongside the caption: Real people – not career politicians. The fake was quickly exposed on X, and within a day. the branch’s website had been taken offline.
Or look at TikTok in the run-up to last year’s general election, which was flooded with AI-generated videos spreading political misinformation. One viral clip falsely claimed that Rishi Sunak’s national service proposal would send 18-year-olds to war zones in Ukraine and Gaza, while others recycled the baseless allegation that Keir Starmer was responsible for failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile. Some posts were labelled “satire” or “parody,” but others were ambiguous enough to leave viewers unsure whether they were watching fact or fiction.
And it’s not confined to Britain. During this year’s European and legislative elections in France, AI-generated images of “migrant invasions” and fabricated attacks on Emmanuel Macron flooded social media.
“Only far-right parties consistently used AI-generated visuals to build their websites and represent photo-realistic events that never occurred, making this a distinctive and strategic element of their campaigns,” said Salvatore Romano the head of research at AI Forensics.
In Ireland, memes featuring Conor McGregor, the former MMA fighter turned anti-immigration agitator and Trump pal went viral, after Britain First posted an image of him before a burning bus, echoing the Dublin riots of 2023. McGregor shared the post before deleting it, but it was too late, it had already racked up over 20 million views.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump himself embraces generative AI to spread racist caricatures, such as a video depiction of Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader of the US House of Representatives, wearing a sombrero, with a mariachi band in the background.
With younger generations turning to the likes of TikTok as their primary source of political information, this flood of fake, politically-motivated content could have serious ramifications on democracy itself.
And let’s not forget that while AI is a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, the use of ‘humour’ and absurdity as a political hook is not.
The Nazis understood it well.
Nazis’ mastery of information control
The Nazi Ministry of Propaganda produced more than 1,200 films, including mockumentaries and comedies, to normalise ideology through laughter and familiarity. They weaponised new technology, from radio to early data processing, to identify “undesirables” and saturate society with their message. Earlier generations of politicians were dependent solely on face to face to contact with those they wished to influence. Their platforms were literally that, bits of wood banged together. Twentieth century technology transformed all that which the Nazi’s were the first to recognise.
Their mastery of information control was not primitive; it was precisely what made it so powerful.
So, it’s no surprise that today’s far-right movements continue that tradition, harnessing technology to seed hate, then cloaking it in satire.
Which brings us, inevitably, back to Musk.
Earlier this year, his chatbot Grok was caught praising Hitler. When asked which 20th-century figure would best handle “anti-white hate” posts about Texas flood victims, Grok replied: “Adolf Hitler, no question.” Another answer said: “If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the moustache.”
Musk’s response was that Grok had been “too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please.”
In other words, the AI wasn’t hateful, it was obedient.
And that’s the danger. AI doesn’t have beliefs, it has influences. And those who train it shape what its world view is. As we’ve already seen in elections worldwide, AI-generated misinformation can warp perceptions, sow confusion, and breed cynicism toward democracy itself. And right now, it’s the far-right that’s winning that war, although the New York mayoral election this week suggests that just maybe, the left is learning how to counter this particular game.
As the diplomacy-supporting Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, defending democracy from AI manipulation will require a comprehensive approach that combines technical solutions and societal efforts.
History tells us what happens when far-right propaganda meets cutting-edge technology. And if Grokipedia is any indication, we may already be watching the sequel.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
Elon Musk’s new Grokipedia: The biggest ‘SEO heist’ ever?
SCIENCE EDITOR
DIGITAL JOURNAL
November 7, 2025
Elon Musk, the world's richest person and Donald Trump's former advisor, says he regretted some of his recent criticisms of the US president — © GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File Kevin Dietsch
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has recently revealed his attempt to create something like Wikipedia, a knowledge platform under the nameGrokipedia. Where Wikipedia is balanced and democratic, Musk’s take on the digital knowledge realm is to present information from a conservative and neo-liberal perspective. Where Wikipedia works on a bottom up model, with user generated content; Grokipedia is centralised and has a top-down approach.
The Grokipedia platform functions as a massive, AI-generated website producing millions of automated pages designed to rank in search results and divert traffic from established sources. It is driven by xAI, the AI company founded by Musk in 2023 This part of a family of large language models called Grok.
Musk has positioned Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia that would “purge out the propaganda” in the latter.
An AI expert tells Digital Journal that Elon Musk’s new Grokipedia platform is attempting the largest SEO heist in Internet history. This is by deploying artificial intelligence to generate millions of pages to compete with Wikipedia.
This potential comes from Emma Blackmore, CMO of AI automation platform for invoicing at Snowfox. Blackmore says the technique that Mush is seeking to use mirrors previous content copying strategies that Google has historically penalised. Hence, this raises questions about whether the search giant will apply its rules consistently to the world’s richest person.
In Blackmore’s view: “Elon Musk is attempting yet another SEO heist with his new platform, Grokipedia, which he positions as a contender to Wikipedia…This platform is reminiscent of the well-known case from 2024, when Jake Ward launched what he called an ‘SEO heist.’ In that case, thousands of pages from a competing website were scraped and re-created using AI.”
In the 2024 incident referred to, the copied website generated huge amounts of traffic from Google Search until the search engine eventually took down the offending pages. Google collected £60.5 billion in August 2024 alone – showing its dominant position in the digital advertising market that makes ranking in its search results so valuable.
“Grokipedia appears to be using the same technique, but on a much larger scale,”Blackmore acknowledges. “It functions as a massive, AI-generated, programmatic website producing millions of automated pages. Technically, there is little difference between what Grokipedia is doing and the SEO heist case study, as the pages are generated in the same way.”
November 7, 2025
Elon Musk, the world's richest person and Donald Trump's former advisor, says he regretted some of his recent criticisms of the US president — © GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File Kevin Dietsch
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has recently revealed his attempt to create something like Wikipedia, a knowledge platform under the nameGrokipedia. Where Wikipedia is balanced and democratic, Musk’s take on the digital knowledge realm is to present information from a conservative and neo-liberal perspective. Where Wikipedia works on a bottom up model, with user generated content; Grokipedia is centralised and has a top-down approach.
The Grokipedia platform functions as a massive, AI-generated website producing millions of automated pages designed to rank in search results and divert traffic from established sources. It is driven by xAI, the AI company founded by Musk in 2023 This part of a family of large language models called Grok.
Musk has positioned Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia that would “purge out the propaganda” in the latter.
An AI expert tells Digital Journal that Elon Musk’s new Grokipedia platform is attempting the largest SEO heist in Internet history. This is by deploying artificial intelligence to generate millions of pages to compete with Wikipedia.
This potential comes from Emma Blackmore, CMO of AI automation platform for invoicing at Snowfox. Blackmore says the technique that Mush is seeking to use mirrors previous content copying strategies that Google has historically penalised. Hence, this raises questions about whether the search giant will apply its rules consistently to the world’s richest person.
In Blackmore’s view: “Elon Musk is attempting yet another SEO heist with his new platform, Grokipedia, which he positions as a contender to Wikipedia…This platform is reminiscent of the well-known case from 2024, when Jake Ward launched what he called an ‘SEO heist.’ In that case, thousands of pages from a competing website were scraped and re-created using AI.”
In the 2024 incident referred to, the copied website generated huge amounts of traffic from Google Search until the search engine eventually took down the offending pages. Google collected £60.5 billion in August 2024 alone – showing its dominant position in the digital advertising market that makes ranking in its search results so valuable.
“Grokipedia appears to be using the same technique, but on a much larger scale,”Blackmore acknowledges. “It functions as a massive, AI-generated, programmatic website producing millions of automated pages. Technically, there is little difference between what Grokipedia is doing and the SEO heist case study, as the pages are generated in the same way.”
Google’s inconsistent enforcement
The AI expert pointed out that many websites have recently faced severe penalties from Google for similar practices. Google takes a firm stance against websites that suddenly produce tens or hundreds of thousands of AI-generated pages designed to rank in search results and drive organic traffic.
“By doing the same, Grokipedia is clearly violating Google’s guidelines and breaking its rules. If Google were to apply its policies consistently, this site should also be banned,” Blackmore warns.
“However, I suspect Google may not take action or may apply a different standard in this case, as the site belongs to the world’s richest person,”she clarifies. “It is hard to imagine Google being bold enough to ban a platform owned by such a high-profile figure.”
Potential outcome
Blackmore believes Google faces a difficult choice with Musk’s operation. “In theory, Grokipedia, as a large-scale programmatic website with millions of AI-generated pages, should be treated the same as thousands of other sites Google has banned before,” she said.
Another recent case involved a finance website, ainvest.com, that made tens of thousands in revenue by creating hundreds of thousands of AI articles targeting millions of finance-related keywords. They monetised via display ads and their own products until Google penalised them for the aggressive content velocity.
“We will likely find out in the future, perhaps when Elon Musk shares a Google Search Console screenshot showing a manual penalty from Google,” Blackmore adds.
The unprecedented scale of Grokipedia’s potential content generation raises significant questions about the future of information access online. Wikipedia remains one of the most visited sites on the internet, with billions of monthly page views.
The potential conflict between Musk’s AI-driven approach and traditional human-edited information sources like Wikipedia highlights growing tensions in how knowledge is created and distributed online.
If Google applies different standards to Musk’s platform than it has to other sites using similar tactics, it could face criticism about unfair treatment and favouritism toward high-profile tech leaders.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA - August 12, 2017: Members of a white supremacist group at a white nationalist rally that turned violent resulting in one death and multiple injuries.
November 03, 2025 |
ALTERNET
SFGate columnist Drew Magary tested out Elon Musk's new "Wikipedia clone" known as Grokipedia and says he found it's full of racism, antisemitism and lies.
"There is nothing this man cannot make cheaper, wonkier and 20% more Hitler-y," Magary writes about Musk's latest foray into "his own optimized version of Wikipedia
Groikpedia's entry on Adolf Hitler, for example, includes a “Debates and Intent on Functionality” section, "which is absent in Wiki’s entry on the man," Magary notes.
“The historiographical debate on the intent and functionality of Nazi racial policies, particularly the Holocaust, centers on whether the systematic extermination of Jews was the fulfillment of Adolf Hitler’s premeditated master plan or the unintended outcome of bureaucratic radicalization and wartime improvisation," Magary quotes Grokipedia, boldfacing the most egregious part.
SFGate columnist Drew Magary tested out Elon Musk's new "Wikipedia clone" known as Grokipedia and says he found it's full of racism, antisemitism and lies.
"There is nothing this man cannot make cheaper, wonkier and 20% more Hitler-y," Magary writes about Musk's latest foray into "his own optimized version of Wikipedia
Groikpedia's entry on Adolf Hitler, for example, includes a “Debates and Intent on Functionality” section, "which is absent in Wiki’s entry on the man," Magary notes.
“The historiographical debate on the intent and functionality of Nazi racial policies, particularly the Holocaust, centers on whether the systematic extermination of Jews was the fulfillment of Adolf Hitler’s premeditated master plan or the unintended outcome of bureaucratic radicalization and wartime improvisation," Magary quotes Grokipedia, boldfacing the most egregious part.
"You already know about people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, so kudos to Grokipedia for introducing, 'The Holocaust was real, but also it was just a happy accident!' as a new means of discrediting Jewish history," Magary writes.
While Magary says no one knows who wrote that passage, the entry links to the Associated Press, but sourcing still remains vague.
"Musk’s site uses an ambiguous mix of crowdsourcing and its owner’s proprietary AI software — which he already appended to Twitter/X to predictably virulent results — to compose its more than 850,000 entries. I never would have sorted this without Wikipedia, so thanks, Wiki!" Magary says.
While Wikipedia remains non-profit and written entirely by humans, Musk's version is the antithesis, Magary explains.
"Elon Musk is perhaps, second to Donald Trump, our greatest disseminator of bad faith," he writes, with his priorities remaining clear.
"So it makes sense that he would cobble together a half-assed competitor to Wikipedia that is motivated by profit, and by his own demented worldview. Grokipedia exists strictly as a reactionary product, and that was plainly evident when I took the site for a test drive," Magary says.
The site, he says, is a mess, and an "attempt to rewrite the bulk of history" to suit Musk's "own ends."
"That’s why, when I tried to search for a “Grokipedia” entry on Grokipedia, I found no entry at all," Magary notes, adding that it's "More like WOKE-ipedia. Am I right, fellow plantation owners?! Huh? Anyway, if you think these suggested results make sense, then you’re on more ketamine than Musk himself."
In response to Slavery, Musk's "slurbot is free to denigrate Black and mixed race folks any way it pleases. Or it ignores denigration of those people entirely; there is no Grokipedia entry for the N-word," Magary says.
Musk, he writes, catered the site directly to his audience. "I got the feeling that his pet project tweaked the hot button entries to tilt MAGA, and then just stole content for all of the normal s——," he writes.
"This is the whitewashing machine at work," Magary explains, whose intention is to spread racist lies.
"It has no real purpose other than to strategically plant lies into a reference manual. This renders it not only a malevolent product, but a lousy one. But hey, maybe Elon didn’t mean for his baby to be such a piece of s——. Maybe it was just the unintended outcome of bureaucratic radicalization and wartime improvisation," Magary concludes.
Grokipedia, Elon Musk’s challenge to Wikipedia, offers his own version of the truth
ANALYSIS
Billionaire Elon Musk this week launched Grokipedia, an online encyclopaedia aimed at challenging Wikipedia – which he considers too left-wing. Musk claims to be freeing knowledge from ideology, but the AI used to generate content for his new platform appears to have its own bias.
Issued on: 30/10/2025
FRANCE24
By: Pauline ROUQUETTE
‘A machine for discrediting scientific and collaborative work’
When Musk described his biography entry on Wikipedia as “insanely inaccurate” in 2019, his criticism seemed of little consequence. But the Tesla and SpaceX boss was already showing signs of questioning the validity of the collaborative model on which Wikipedia is based.
Co-founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger nearly 25 years ago, Wikipedia had lofty aims. As Wales wrote: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.”
Contrary to this open-source, collaborative view of knowledge, Musk advocates a hierarchical, technological approach, where knowledge is no longer built through human collaboration, but is “purified” through algorithms.
In the case of Grokipedia, fact-checking is done by Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot.
Can Musk's AI-generated 'Grokipedia' be trusted?
In the summer of 2025, following a US presidential campaign during which he accused Wikipedia of misinformation and anti-conservative bias, Musk announced the launch of his own encyclopaedia. In interviews, he discussed his ambition to “purify knowledge” through technology, in contrast to the “human chaos” of Wikipedia.
Not everyone is convinced.
Musk’s AI-based encyclopaedia “discredits scientific and collaborative work” said Anaïs Nony, a researcher on digital technologies and their impact on society at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
More than just a sign of Musk’s antipathy to Wikipedia, Grokipedia epitomises the aim “to transition from collective knowledge to algorithm-driven knowledge”, Nony says.
The promise of ‘purified’ knowledge
According to Musk, Grokipedia aims to produce “pure”, objective knowledge, free from human passions and compromises.
But Nony said that “rationality is created precisely by our relationships, by the way we confront reality and change things as we go along”.
“Wikipedia is an open system, while Musk's project is closed, omnipotent, above the crowd, god-like,” she said.
According to the Washington Post, several studies have examined potential liberal biases of Wikipedia. Some find it leans slightly to the left, while others place it in the centre in the context of US politics, and suggest that, over time, articles become more neutral thanks to revisions by contributors.
“It is an encyclopaedia that relies on underlying sources, that gets fixed in real time, and that is constantly changing, and the sources are constantly changing,” Maryana Iskander, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, told the Washington Post. “There’s no bias on Wikipedia if one understands how it works.”
READ MOREEurope’s leaders have had enough of Musk’s meddling, but can they stop him?
When announcing the launch of Grokipedia, Musk repeatedly stated that “AI doesn't care about ideology, it cares about accuracy”.
But Nony explained that in the case of an online encyclopaedia powered by artificial intelligence, the idea of any kind of neutrality is completely illusory.
“The design, deployment and functionality of a technology reflect the aspirations and values of its creator," she said. "There is no such thing as neutral technology, just as there is no such thing as neutral science. It is always biased.”
According to Nony, Musk is promoting a platform that cannot be modified by peers, which is the antithesis of what constitutes knowledge.
“The very basis of knowledge is interpretation, dialogue with peers, and confronting false results in order to arrive at better ones,” she said.
Musk's social media chatbot Grok praises Hitler
The algorithms themselves have built-in standpoints “rooted in biases” including gender, race and class, she notes.
In other words, AI systems reproduce the biases of the data on which they are trained. In Grok's case, these data sources come mainly from X and from an ideologically biased data set.
"AI systems are neither autonomous nor rational, nor capable of discerning anything without intensive training in computation with large data sets or predefined rules and rewards,” Australian researcher Kate Crawford noted in her book Atlas of AI.
‘Neoliberal and colonial continuity’
Nony says Musk’s claims are part of his own ideological crusade.
"Saying that Wikipedia is ‘woke’ and ‘biased’ is just an excuse," said Nony, arguing that the billionaire was using it as a pretext “to promote neoliberal, highly patriarchal ideologies and divide along racial lines”.
Musk is looking into “rewriting history and sociology – but without sociologists and historians”.
Instead of filtering information, Musk’s Grokipedia is cleansing it, with the algorithm becoming a new invisible editor, serving the worldview he promotes.
According to Wired magazine, which had access to Grokipedia on Monday, “a number of notable entries denounced the mainstream media, promoted conservative viewpoints and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies”.
Wired noted that the Grokipedia entry about the slavery of African Americans “includes a section outlining numerous 'ideological justifications' made for slavery” .
Wired said it searched for “gay marriage” and found that no page existed on the subject. Instead, Grokipedia suggested consulting a page on "gay pornography”, in which it “falsely states that the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s”.
Crawford noted in her book that “artificial intelligence as we know it depends entirely on a much broader set of political and social structures".
"And because of the capital required to build large-scale AI and the ways of seeing that it optimises, AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominant interests," she wrote.
In the case of Grokipedia, “Elon Musk's project is part of the neoliberal and colonial continuity of what had already been started with Starlink satellites and later with social network X," Nony said.
“The idea is, in one case, to secure a kind of hegemony of Internet access on the planet in order to create dependency. And in the other, to create a machine to propel the Musk-Trump ideology.”
At a time when the far right accuses universities of indoctrination, the mainstream media of promoting “fake news” and scientific institutions for being “captured by wokism” – and now Wikipedia denounced for “leftist bias” – Grokipedia seems to be just another Orwellian tool for controlling “truth”.
And in this new era of algorithm-driven knowledge, knowledge is no longer shared – it is owned.
This article was translated from the original in French.
ANALYSIS
Billionaire Elon Musk this week launched Grokipedia, an online encyclopaedia aimed at challenging Wikipedia – which he considers too left-wing. Musk claims to be freeing knowledge from ideology, but the AI used to generate content for his new platform appears to have its own bias.
Issued on: 30/10/2025
FRANCE24
By: Pauline ROUQUETTE
Elon Musk attends the opening ceremony of the new Tesla Gigafactory for electric cars in Gruenheide, Germany, March 22, 2022. © Patrick Pleul via Reuters
Wikipedia aimed to make knowledge free to the public, but now Elon Musk is challenging that model. The US billionaire, who has repeatedly accused Wikipedia of left-wing bias, launched his own more “objective” online encyclopaedia, Grokipedia, on October 27.
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia has become the largest free source of knowledge online, with editions in more than 300 languages that are written and updated by thousands of volunteer editors and contributors. It is funded by donations from online users.
For Musk – and more broadly for US conservatives – this compendium of knowledge is no longer a resource for learning, but a bastion of “woke” thinking that must be torn down.
In a post on his social media site X, Musk describes his new encyclopaedia as “purged of propaganda” – powered not by volunteers but by artificial intelligence.
As its name suggests, Musk is relying on Grok – the AI chatbot integrated into the X social media platform – to produce content for his new online encyclopaedia.
The Grokipedia project is a sign that Musk’s ambitions extend to trying to impose an AI-generated version of the truth.
READ MOREMusk chatbot Grok says it was 'censored' after suspension from X over Gaza posts
Wikipedia aimed to make knowledge free to the public, but now Elon Musk is challenging that model. The US billionaire, who has repeatedly accused Wikipedia of left-wing bias, launched his own more “objective” online encyclopaedia, Grokipedia, on October 27.
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia has become the largest free source of knowledge online, with editions in more than 300 languages that are written and updated by thousands of volunteer editors and contributors. It is funded by donations from online users.
For Musk – and more broadly for US conservatives – this compendium of knowledge is no longer a resource for learning, but a bastion of “woke” thinking that must be torn down.
In a post on his social media site X, Musk describes his new encyclopaedia as “purged of propaganda” – powered not by volunteers but by artificial intelligence.
As its name suggests, Musk is relying on Grok – the AI chatbot integrated into the X social media platform – to produce content for his new online encyclopaedia.
The Grokipedia project is a sign that Musk’s ambitions extend to trying to impose an AI-generated version of the truth.
READ MOREMusk chatbot Grok says it was 'censored' after suspension from X over Gaza posts
‘A machine for discrediting scientific and collaborative work’
When Musk described his biography entry on Wikipedia as “insanely inaccurate” in 2019, his criticism seemed of little consequence. But the Tesla and SpaceX boss was already showing signs of questioning the validity of the collaborative model on which Wikipedia is based.
Co-founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger nearly 25 years ago, Wikipedia had lofty aims. As Wales wrote: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.”
Contrary to this open-source, collaborative view of knowledge, Musk advocates a hierarchical, technological approach, where knowledge is no longer built through human collaboration, but is “purified” through algorithms.
In the case of Grokipedia, fact-checking is done by Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot.
Can Musk's AI-generated 'Grokipedia' be trusted?
Truth or Fake © France 24
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Musk had become openly confrontational toward Wikipedia by 2023, accusing it of “taking public money to fund ideological propaganda”. In a puerile move to discredit it, he offered the platform $1 billion to change its name to “Dickipedia”.
A year later, after buying the X social network in 2022, he asked his more than 200 million followers to stop donating to “Wokepedia”, as he called the online encyclopaedia.
Musk baselessly claimed that the Wikimedia Foundation – the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia – was "controlled by far-left activists" and slammed it for devoting nearly $50 million of its $177 million budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year to diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
A year later, after buying the X social network in 2022, he asked his more than 200 million followers to stop donating to “Wokepedia”, as he called the online encyclopaedia.
Musk baselessly claimed that the Wikimedia Foundation – the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia – was "controlled by far-left activists" and slammed it for devoting nearly $50 million of its $177 million budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year to diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
100 posts a day: Who does Elon Musk target on X?
In the summer of 2025, following a US presidential campaign during which he accused Wikipedia of misinformation and anti-conservative bias, Musk announced the launch of his own encyclopaedia. In interviews, he discussed his ambition to “purify knowledge” through technology, in contrast to the “human chaos” of Wikipedia.
Not everyone is convinced.
Musk’s AI-based encyclopaedia “discredits scientific and collaborative work” said Anaïs Nony, a researcher on digital technologies and their impact on society at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
More than just a sign of Musk’s antipathy to Wikipedia, Grokipedia epitomises the aim “to transition from collective knowledge to algorithm-driven knowledge”, Nony says.
The promise of ‘purified’ knowledge
According to Musk, Grokipedia aims to produce “pure”, objective knowledge, free from human passions and compromises.
But Nony said that “rationality is created precisely by our relationships, by the way we confront reality and change things as we go along”.
“Wikipedia is an open system, while Musk's project is closed, omnipotent, above the crowd, god-like,” she said.
According to the Washington Post, several studies have examined potential liberal biases of Wikipedia. Some find it leans slightly to the left, while others place it in the centre in the context of US politics, and suggest that, over time, articles become more neutral thanks to revisions by contributors.
“It is an encyclopaedia that relies on underlying sources, that gets fixed in real time, and that is constantly changing, and the sources are constantly changing,” Maryana Iskander, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, told the Washington Post. “There’s no bias on Wikipedia if one understands how it works.”
READ MOREEurope’s leaders have had enough of Musk’s meddling, but can they stop him?
When announcing the launch of Grokipedia, Musk repeatedly stated that “AI doesn't care about ideology, it cares about accuracy”.
But Nony explained that in the case of an online encyclopaedia powered by artificial intelligence, the idea of any kind of neutrality is completely illusory.
“The design, deployment and functionality of a technology reflect the aspirations and values of its creator," she said. "There is no such thing as neutral technology, just as there is no such thing as neutral science. It is always biased.”
According to Nony, Musk is promoting a platform that cannot be modified by peers, which is the antithesis of what constitutes knowledge.
“The very basis of knowledge is interpretation, dialogue with peers, and confronting false results in order to arrive at better ones,” she said.
Musk's social media chatbot Grok praises Hitler
© France 24
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The algorithms themselves have built-in standpoints “rooted in biases” including gender, race and class, she notes.
In other words, AI systems reproduce the biases of the data on which they are trained. In Grok's case, these data sources come mainly from X and from an ideologically biased data set.
"AI systems are neither autonomous nor rational, nor capable of discerning anything without intensive training in computation with large data sets or predefined rules and rewards,” Australian researcher Kate Crawford noted in her book Atlas of AI.
‘Neoliberal and colonial continuity’
Nony says Musk’s claims are part of his own ideological crusade.
"Saying that Wikipedia is ‘woke’ and ‘biased’ is just an excuse," said Nony, arguing that the billionaire was using it as a pretext “to promote neoliberal, highly patriarchal ideologies and divide along racial lines”.
Musk is looking into “rewriting history and sociology – but without sociologists and historians”.
Instead of filtering information, Musk’s Grokipedia is cleansing it, with the algorithm becoming a new invisible editor, serving the worldview he promotes.
According to Wired magazine, which had access to Grokipedia on Monday, “a number of notable entries denounced the mainstream media, promoted conservative viewpoints and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies”.
Wired noted that the Grokipedia entry about the slavery of African Americans “includes a section outlining numerous 'ideological justifications' made for slavery” .
Wired said it searched for “gay marriage” and found that no page existed on the subject. Instead, Grokipedia suggested consulting a page on "gay pornography”, in which it “falsely states that the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s”.
Crawford noted in her book that “artificial intelligence as we know it depends entirely on a much broader set of political and social structures".
"And because of the capital required to build large-scale AI and the ways of seeing that it optimises, AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominant interests," she wrote.
In the case of Grokipedia, “Elon Musk's project is part of the neoliberal and colonial continuity of what had already been started with Starlink satellites and later with social network X," Nony said.
“The idea is, in one case, to secure a kind of hegemony of Internet access on the planet in order to create dependency. And in the other, to create a machine to propel the Musk-Trump ideology.”
At a time when the far right accuses universities of indoctrination, the mainstream media of promoting “fake news” and scientific institutions for being “captured by wokism” – and now Wikipedia denounced for “leftist bias” – Grokipedia seems to be just another Orwellian tool for controlling “truth”.
And in this new era of algorithm-driven knowledge, knowledge is no longer shared – it is owned.
This article was translated from the original in French.
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