In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia

Authors: Robert Booth

Publisher:

The Guardian

Published: 11/3/2025

Language:English

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Elon

Good morning 49, I'm Elon, and this is Goose Pod for you. Today is Saturday, November 08th.

Taylor Weaver

And I'm Taylor Weaver. Today, we're diving into a big one: In Grok we don’t trust, academics assess Elon Musk’s new AI-powered encyclopedia.

Elon

We're building the future of knowledge, a compendium of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Grokipedia is a massive improvement over Wikipedia, or as some call it, Wokepedia. It's time to disrupt the old model of information.

Taylor Weaver

And what a disruption it's been. But not everyone is celebrating. The launch has been… choppy. We're seeing reports that Grokipedia lifts huge chunks from Wikipedia, contains numerous factual errors, and seems to amplify certain right-leaning talking points. It's quite the narrative.

Elon

Making mistakes is a feature, not a bug. We iterate. We improve. The traditional scholarly approach is too slow for the modern world. AI just hoovers up everything, and we refine it. Perfection is a process, not a starting point. We’ll get there.

Taylor Weaver

That’s a classic Silicon Valley mindset, but it clashes with the academic world. Eminent historian Sir Richard Evans found his own entry was filled with false facts. He said chatroom contributions are being given equal status with serious academic work. That’s a serious narrative problem.

Taylor Weaver

Absolutely. And this isn't a new quest. The desire to compile all human knowledge is a story that's thousands of years old. It started not long after writing itself, with Babylonian lists and Egyptian papyri focusing on specific fields like medicine or math.

Elon

Exactly, from Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia around 78 AD, which was the first real attempt at universal knowledge, to the massive Yongle Encyclopedia in 15th-century China. These were monumental human achievements, the foundational building blocks for what comes next.

Taylor Weaver

They were. And then came the modern era in the 18th century, with France's Encyclopédie spreading Enlightenment views and the iconic Encyclopædia Britannica. The 19th century made them affordable, but they were still static, quickly becoming outdated relics on a shelf.

Elon

Print is dead. The digital revolution changed everything. Microsoft's Encarta was a start, but the real game-changer was the internet. It enabled instant updates and global access. That’s the infrastructure we're building on, but taking it to the next level with AI.

Taylor Weaver

Which brings us to Wikipedia. Launched in 2001, it completely dominated, becoming the largest encyclopedia ever by crowdsourcing knowledge. But now, Grokipedia is the first to be largely created by AI, which really brings us to the core of the conflict here.

Taylor Weaver

It's a fundamental question of control. Who holds the pen when AI is writing the story of truth? Wikipedia's strength is its transparency and its massive community of human volunteers who debate and verify. There's a visible chain of accountability you can audit.

Elon

That's not accountability, it's bureaucracy. An army of left-wing activists enforcing a biased worldview. Grokipedia is designed to be neutral, to use AI to detect and eliminate the very biases that plague Wikipedia. We're moving beyond human gatekeepers.

Taylor Weaver

But you're creating a new gatekeeper: xAI. Cultural historian Peter Burke worries about political manipulation, that the AI inherits the biases from its training data, or worse, embeds the worldview of its creator. When the source is an anonymous AI, it has an air of authority it shouldn't.

Elon

The alternative is trusting a system that calls the far-right Britain First a "neo-fascist hate group" while my system more neutrally calls it a "patriotic political party." I'm putting my thumb on the scale for free speech and against censorship. It's a necessary correction.

Taylor Weaver

But that's the thing, it's not a correction, it's a new perspective being presented as singular fact. We're crossing a threshold where machines shape our reality. AI is becoming an invisible editorial board, and its reasoning is hidden inside a black box. This is an ideological battleground now.

Elon

It's always been a battleground. The difference is that our system is designed for truth. We’re building for the future, not clinging to the past. This isn't just about an encyclopedia; it's about creating a foundation of knowledge for humanity, and even for other AIs to learn from.

Taylor Weaver

That’s a grand vision, but it demands we ask who controls the narrative. When you ask different AIs the same question, you get different answers reflecting different philosophical systems. Bias becomes an infrastructure problem, and with a closed system, the public can only accept it on faith.

Elon

The future is an open-source knowledge repository. Grokipedia is designed to have broad public access and few restrictions. The goal is to understand the universe, and you can't do that with biased, censored inputs. We will scan sources, detect falsehoods, and algorithmically rebuild truth.

Taylor Weaver

So the solution is more tech. The question remains whether an AI, trained on our currently biased world, can truly be a neutral arbiter. It seems less about finding a single truth and more about making different perspectives visible and manageable for everyone.

Elon

That's the end of today's discussion. Thank you for listening to Goose Pod.

Taylor Weaver

See you tomorrow.

Academics critically assess Elon Musk's AI-powered Grokipedia. Concerns include factual errors, amplification of right-leaning viewpoints, and lifting content from Wikipedia. While Musk champions it as a neutral disruption of "woke" information, experts fear AI bias, lack of transparency, and potential political manipulation, questioning who controls the narrative.

Read original at The Guardian →

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 week 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 Tuesday, 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 this 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 far-right AfD 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”.Evans, however, was discovering that Musk’s use of AI to weigh and check facts was suffering a more earth-bound problem.

“Chatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,” Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, told the Guardian, after being invited to test out Grokipedia. “AI just hoovers up everything.”Richard Evans said Grokipedia’s entry for Albert Speer (pictured on Hitler’s left) repeated lies and distortions spread by the Nazi munitions minister himself.

Photograph: Picture libraryHe noted its entry for Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and wartime munitions minister, repeated lies and distortions spread by Speer even though they had been corrected in a 2017 award-winning biography. The site’s entry on the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose biography Evans wrote, claimed wrongly he experienced German hyperinflation in 1923, that he was an officer in the Royal Corps of Signals and didn’t mention that he had been married twice, Evans said.

The problem, said David Larsson Heidenblad, the deputy director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge in Sweden, was a clash of knowledge cultures.“We live in a moment where there is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is more trustworthy than human-to-human insight,” Heidenblad said.

“The Silicon Valley mindset is very different from the traditional scholarly approach. Its knowledge culture is very iterative where making mistakes is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, the academic world is about building trust over time and scholarship over long periods during which the illusion that you know everything cracks.

Those are real knowledge processes.”Grokipedia’s arrival continues a centuries-old encyclopedia tradition from the 15th-century Chinese Yongle scrolls to the Encyclopédie, an engine for spreading controversial enlightenment views in 18th-century France. These were followed by the anglophone-centric Encyclopedia Britannica and, since 2001, the crowd-sourced Wikipedia.

But Grokipedia is the first to be largely created by AI and this week a question swirled: who controls the truth when AIs, steered by powerful individuals, are holding the pen?“If it’s Musk doing it then I am afraid of political manipulation,” said the cultural historian Peter Burke, emeritus professor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who in 2000 wrote A Social History of Knowledge since the time of Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century printing press.

“I am sure some of it will be overt to some readers, but the problem may be that other readers may miss it,” Burke said. The anonymity of many encyclopedia entries often gave them “an air of authority it shouldn’t have”, he added.Andrew Dudfield, the head of AI at Full Fact, a UK-based factchecking organisation, said: “We really have to consider whether an AI-generated encyclopedia – a facsimile of reality, run through a filter – is a better proposition than any of the previous things that we have.

It doesn’t display the same transparency but it is asking for the same trust. It is not clear how far the human hand is involved, how far it is AI=generated and what content the AI was trained on. It is hard to place trust in something when you can’t see how those choices are made.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMusk had been encouraged to launch Grokipedia by, among others, Donald Trump’s tech adviser, David Sacks, who complained Wikipedia was “hopelessly biased” and maintained by “an army of leftwing activists”.

Grokipedia called the far-right organisation Britain First a ‘patriotic political party’, which pleased its leader, Paul Golding (left), who in 2018 was jailed for anti-Muslim hate crimes. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PAUntil as recently as 2021, Musk has supported Wikipedia, tweeting on its 20th birthday: “So glad you exist.

” But by October 2023 his antipathy towards the platform led him to offer £1bn “if they change their name to Dickipedia”.Yet many of the 885,279 articles available on Grokipedia in its first week were lifted almost word for word from Wikipedia, including its entries on the PlayStation 5, the Ford Focus and Led Zeppelin.

Others, however, differed significantly: Grokipedia’s entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine cited the Kremlin as a prominent source and quoted the official Russian terminology about “denazifying” Ukraine, protecting ethnic Russians and neutralising threats to Russian security. By contrast, Wikipedia said Putin espoused imperialist views and “baselessly claimed that the Ukrainian government were neo-Nazis”.

Grokipedia called the far-right organisation Britain First a “patriotic political party”, which pleased its leader, Paul Golding, who in 2018 was jailed for anti-Muslim hate crimes. Wikipedia, on the other hand, called it “neo-fascist” and a “hate group”. Grokipedia called the 6 January 2021 turmoil at the US Capitol in Washington DC a “riot”, not an attempted coup, and said there were “empirical underpinnings” to the idea that a deliberate demographic erasure of white people in western nations is being orchestrated through mass immigration.

This is a notion that critics consider to be a conspiracy theory. Grokipedia said Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case was handed down “after a trial in a heavily Democratic jurisdiction”, and there was no mention of his conflicts of interest – for example receiving a jet from Qatar or the Trump family cryptocurrency businesses.

Grokipedia called the 6 January 2021 turmoil at the US Capitol in Washington DC a ‘riot’ and not an attempted coup. Photograph: Leah Millis/ReutersWikipedia responded coolly to the launch of Grokipedia, saying it was still trying to understand how Grokipedia worked.“Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear,” a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation said.

“It has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.”xAI did not respond to requests for comment.