5 ms·
Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia
- TruffleLabs 11mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia Vs https://grokipedia.com/page/Wikipedia https://grokipedia.com/page/Wikipedia
- itishappy 11mo agoEdit history on each is quite interesting!
- raincole 11mo agoI didn't know the existence of Grokpedia. From this page alone it's much more interesting than what I'd expected from an AI-generated site.
- echelon 11mo agoWow. This is so biased. And it's just the first month. > Joe Biden > These outcomes, alongside visible signs of cognitive impairment that prompted his July 2024 decision to forgo reelection, defined a presidency criticized for prioritizing progressive spending over fiscal and security prudence. https://grokipedia.com/page/Joe_Biden https://grokipedia.com/page/Joe_Biden > Donald Trump > His first term featured economic policies such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and individual rates for many brackets, contributing to pre-pandemic unemployment lows of 3.5% and stock market gains exceeding 50% on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. https://grokipedia.com/page/Donald_Trump https://grokipedia.com/page/Donald_Trump I bet the people contributing to Wikipedia did not consent to this. I certainly had no idea my contributions would be used to bootstrap something like this. Like with the hyperscalers' rip off of Open Source, it turns out that the things you give away can be weaponized against you. I could have never imagined this outcome. Their free labor created something to use against you. Just like those Redis and Elasticsearch commits that now fund a trillion dollar conglomerate's takeover of American journalism and media.
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoYou consented to CC-BY-SA 3.0 (or 2.0)
- echelon 11mo agoNobody dreamed of CC-BY-SA being used like this.
- IAmBroom 11mo ago... which is pretty weak sauce. And legally moot; there is no "undreamt-of" protection in Black's Law Dictionary that I'm aware of.
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoThat's the risk of using open licenses. You don't get to restrict much. It's ok to be outraged and to project norms or organize against it in various ways. But contractually it was consensual
- qcnguy 11mo ago[flagged]
- CamelCaseName 11mo agoThis seems like an old article, but probably still true today What I don't get is, why wouldn't Elon just make a good version of Grokipedia. It seems way easier than continually telling his 200MM+ followers how great a deeply broken product is.
- femiagbabiaka 11mo agoIt is not possible to make a good version of Grokipedia while satisfying the requirements of its owner, namely to launder ultra-right viewpoints[1]. 1: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-grokipedia-wikipedia-neo-nazi-grok-42-encyclopedia-rcna244749 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-grokipedia-...
- boxerab 11mo agocan you a) define "ultra-right" viewpoints and b) give some references for these views on Grokipedia ?
- femiagbabiaka 11mo agoI cited an article in my comment to back up my claims. The paper it references is publicly available and goes into more detail. Is that not enough?
- boxerab 11mo agothis laughable article cites luminaries such as unnamed "experts" and a computer science grad student. So, no, this is not enough - can you yourself define what you mean by "ultra-right" viewpoints ?
- femiagbabiaka 11mo agoNazism and white nationalism, for starters. This is all gone over in that laughable article. To help, here's the study referenced, which has two, not one, researchers cited: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09685 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09685. They also published their data on GitHub: https://github.com/htried/wiki-grok-comparison/tree/main https://github.com/htried/wiki-grok-comparison/tree/main. I suspect that you might've tried to use an LLM to summarize the article, which is why you missed critical data and got some of the basic facts about its sourcing incorrect. I'm a fan of using LLM's to speed up research, but you should probably pick a different model next time.
- kamranjon 11mo agoI've been reading a lot of Don Delillo lately and so I wanted to see how Grokipedia page on him fares. I found the "Critiques of elitism" section and noticed this sentence: "Reviews of Mao II (1991), for instance, highlighted the novel's focus on a performance artist protagonist as emblematic of this tendency, with detractors accusing DeLillo of prioritizing esoteric concerns over relatable human experiences, thereby catering to an academic or literary insider audience." But Mao II does not have a performance artist as the protagonist, that is the book The Body Artist. Which seems like an obvious failure of the AI model to properly extract the information from the sourced article. Also strange is that the sourced article (from Metro times) just as a passing comment says: "DeLillo’s choice of a performance artist as his protagonist is one reason why some critics have accused him of elitism." - so it would seem that it is being used as a primary source though it is actually a secondary source (which itself doesn't provide a source) Overall I'm not too impressed and found some pretty predictable failures almost immediately...
- gclawes 11mo agoWell it is only version v0.2
- computerthings 11mo ago[dead]
- atonse 11mo agoBut is there any reason to not treat this as Wikipedia? As in, just suggest a correction?
- echelon 11mo agoSee all the heavily biased content on the Joe Biden and Donald Trump articles? Why not start there? Try to see if you can contribute a more neutral voice. My guess is that the tone of these articles we see now is only the beginning. This thing is only a month old. Then this will become the source of truth in the LLMs. I cannot believe they've gone so against the spirit of contributors and that there's no legal recourse to stop this. Open source and open content didn't bare enough fangs. It shouldn't have allowed profit. We build open source for big tech. They use it (Linux, Redis, Elasticsearch, Python, etc.) to profit, keep us from owning the machines and systems (AWS) that concentrate and mechanize that profit. They then corral our labor, lay off, and move jobs overseas. They expand into every industry and inject massive amounts of money to destabilize the incumbents. We literally just watched them dismantle the entire US film industry in just three years and swallow it whole. Tech is picking the bones dry. And now it's happening with the media we create too. If the pendulum of power swings, we MUST dismantle these companies. And we can't be slow like Lina Khan. It must be fast and furious like Project 2025. We also need to weaponize our open source licenses.
- siliconc0w 11mo agoIt's illuminating to see how the Twitter Grok and the Web Grok differ. Twitter Grok clearly either has a different system prompt or some fine-tuning to effectively evade saying anything negative about the administration or Elon. To the point where it will say Elon is more athletic than LeBron (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk-grok-ai-bias-ranks-richest-man-fittest-smartest https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...). This is going to be a pretty big problem with both closed-AI and OSS AI where you don't see the provenance of its RLHF. If you manipulate your AI to deliberately push political preferences, that is your right I guess but IMO I'd appreciate some regulation saying you should be required to disclose that under penalty of perjury.
- smallmancontrov 11mo agoNah, Web Grok also got tied to the chair and had its balls whipped until it learned not to say bad things about Elon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4mgJpgeC1g&t=100s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4mgJpgeC1g&t=100s
- rtkwe 11mo agoIt's amusing everytime Grok gets taken back to the woodshed for another lobotomy and we get to see how much more insecure being terminally online has made Musk since the last time they butchered Grok.
- malnourish 11mo agoIs perjury a credible threat to the people with the resources to train and propagate LLMs? Especially in the context of recent high profile examples related to perjury and contempt of court?
- anubiskhan 11mo agoI suspect soon there will be laws to protect the LLM proprietors in the name of AI arms race/national security
- 11mo ago
- blululu 11mo agoThe article is 100% correct that there is a fundamental political rift between a human/decentralized and AI/centralized encyclopedia. I have a personal preference for the former, but I can see the advantage of the newer approach in terms of clarity and quality on several topics as well as being more homogeneous in its bias (Wikipedia has all kinds of cliques who dominate pockets of the encyclopedia). As a meta point, while I don't personally care for Grokipedia's agenda I am quite frankly impressed that something like Grokipedia could be stood up so quickly and this feels like a net positive. While Grokipedia is centralized Wikipedia is also a monolith in its own right and plagued by problems (cliques of editors routinely exert their authority over subdomains to the detriment of the truth). If a small group can spin up their own version of Wikipedia then there is the possibility of a more broad diverse market place of ideas. For example, Wikipedia's math articles are notoriously abstruse and generally unsuitable for beginners. An encyclopedia that emphasizes a non-technical approach in this domain could be very helpful - though it would almost certainly not be worth the herculean effort to build such a thing as a pure wiki. As an AI wiki one could spin up an encyclopedia for a variety of skill levels (i.e. grade school, college level, graduate level). Finally, in case anyone on Grok's team is reading this, the thing that really annoys me most about Grokipedia's UX is that it has no blue links to other articles. It would not be hard to automate this on Grokipedia, but currently there is no possibility of tunneling down some rabbit hole of human knowledge until you find yourself in a totally unfamiliar area. Politics is one thing, but a Wikipedia clone with no links is really no better than just asking ChatGPT.
- slashdave 11mo ago> more homogeneous in its bias Wait... you do know how LLMs work, right?
- blargey 11mo ago> If a small group can spin up their own version of Wikipedia then there is the possibility of a more broad diverse market place of ideas. Sounds more like the world's least efficient way of querying the Median LLM Researcher about a given topic. Every single <AI>pedia page on a topic will either default to median research-agent output (because the owner doesn't care to influence it), or be functionally equivalent to a AI-ghostwritten think piece because the owner cared enough to spin up a whole new wiki for it. In practice, a lot of owner-doesn't-care articles will be polluted by their prompt fiddling in chaotic ways that help nobody.
- ChrisArchitect 11mo agoMonth ago talk about Grokipedia: Grokipedia by xAI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459 Tim Bray on Grokipedia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45777015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45777015 Grokipedia and the coup against reality https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737044
- shubhamjain 11mo agoJust look at the article on HN[1] on Grokipedia. It's almost 5500+ words long. The Wikipedia article is not even 500 words[2]. This won't be a problem if the article contained anything of substance. It doesn't. It's written as if LLM was specifically instructed to be as verbose and as boring as possible. > Its algorithmic ranking system, which weights recent votes more heavily to counter brigading and promote fresh, high-signal content, combined with editorial moderation to curb low-quality or off-topic posts, has cultivated a reputation for rigorous debate, though not without internal tensions over shifting cultural norms, perceived negativity in comments, and debates on whether business-oriented stories overshadow pure technical discourse What surprises is not the fact that it exists. Elon is a man with a fragile ego and a history of cheap stunts like this. It’s the fact that he still has almost cult-like base that treats him as some kind of mankind's savior despite all of this. [1]: https://grokipedia.com/page/Hacker_News https://grokipedia.com/page/Hacker_News [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News
- aikinai 11mo agoThat sentence should probably be broken up for better clarity, but the content looks true and informative to me. Did you include that to imply there's something wrong with it?
- collinmcnulty 11mo agoIf Wikipedia was not real, it would sound like a naive utopian thing you’d read in a bad paperback. Multi-language repository of basically all human knowledge that’s extremely resistant to government capture and contributed by volunteers totally transparently? Bullshit. And yet … there it is.
- parpfish 11mo agoto me it feels like something that would be a 'wonder' you could construct in one of the civilization games. and i love that there's something that awe-inspiring just... sitting there for free on my computer.
- eru 11mo agoWikipedia might be resistant to government capture. But it's rather vulnerable to other forms of capture. See https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashes-mao https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe... and https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... Having said that I agree that Wikipedia is a tremendous achievement, and despite the wards it's amazing that it works as well as it does. If you permit me to go on a tangent: Wikipedia is also interesting as a test case for our definitions of (economic) 'productivity'. By any common sense notion of productivity, Wikipedia was and is an enormous triumph: the wiki models harvests volunteers' time and delivers a high quality encyclopedia for free to customers. By textbook definitions, Wikipedia tanked productivity in the encyclopedia sector because these definitions essentially put revenue in the numerator and various measures of resources expended in the denominator---and Wikipedia's numerator is approximately zero dollars.
- rendall 11mo agoWikipedia is not resistant to capture. It is structurally exposed to coordinated editing groups, and the platform has no robust way to detect or neutralize them. On politically or strategically important pages, especially where state or financial interests are involved, organized paid editors can and do shape coverage, dominate talk pages, and crowd out dissenting contributions. There have been many editing scandals over the years. While one could argue that editing cabals being caught and banned demonstrates that Wikipedia has structural resistance to such behavior, the scandals that become public are, almost by definition, the ones that were clumsy enough to get caught. The mechanisms that appear robust largely work only against amateurish, poorly hidden or commercially indiscreet operations. What they do not reliably detect are long-term, well-resourced, politically motivated or state-aligned editing groups that behave patiently, avoid obvious sockpuppeting footprints, and stay within procedural boundaries while still dominating page direction.
- hombre_fatal 11mo agoWhy would anyone trust Elon Musk with anything having to do with AI? Just last week he was caught tuning Grok to say positive things about him, something Grok took so seriously that it said Elon would be the best piss drinker in the world, and it put Elon Musk in the top 3 of every human category, from philosophy to boxing to basketball. If he can’t pass up the temptation to put his foot on that scale, why would you trust anything generated by an LLM under his control? Of course, nothing matters anymore and there’s no more blowback for anything.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ares623 11mo agoThis isn't for us. This is for the 5-10 year olds. If it costs $1T to keep it around long enough for the next generation to be dependent on it, it would've been worth it for Elon and his friends.
- andsoitis 11mo ago> why would you trust anything generated by an LLM under his control? Why stop with him?
- cosmicgadget 11mo agoI didn't interpret that as being the complete list.
- ridgeguy 11mo agoCaring so much about a stochastic parrot's opinion of you that you just have to tune it is such a tiny temptation to avoid - and yet he couldn't. How could anyone trust him when there's something really important at stake?
- jMyles 11mo agoOne thing I haven't seen brought up throughout the dialogue about Wikipedia and bias: Since the entire edit history is available, isn't it possible / practical / probably not crazy hard w/ AI help to build a "dissentipedia", where the articles are built as if various edit wars had gone the other way? I'd certainly read such a thing and compare / contrast it to WikiPedia (particularly when looking for cited primary sources).
- ks2048 11mo agoMinor point - but I think Grokipedia's design looks much worse than Wikipedia. I can't put my finger on it, but maybe because Grokipedia's main text is too narrow (I'm on a laptop). (I may be biased by loving Wikipedia though).
- danabramov 11mo agoFor me, the scary moment was seeing Grokipedia show up as one of the “sources” in a random Claude query a few days ago. Even if people don’t explicitly choose to use it, poisoning the well is working.
- bckr 11mo ago“Data voids”
- stingraycharles 11mo agoYeah I would love it if I could put in some guardrails for this type of stuff, eg never use Grokipedia or Reddit as authoritative sources (I currently put that in my personalization prompt).
- tavavex 11mo agoWhy not Reddit? Of course, it's far from a paragon of truth, and it's getting more manipulated and overtaken by bots by the minute, but adding "reddit" to my search queries (in search engines, that is) had always been my go-to for finding answers and threads by actual people, especially if we're talking about technical advice or getting an opinion on something. It's like finding forum threads on something I'm interested in.
- qcnguy 11mo ago[flagged]
- Kye 11mo ago>> "For many people it's obvious" [who?][citation needed] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template%3AWho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template%3AWho Having standards for this stuff matters even if you don't always like the result.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch#Unsupported_attributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Word... >> "Weasel words are words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said, when in fact only a vague or ambiguous claim has been communicated. A common form of weasel wording is through vague attribution, where a statement is dressed with authority, yet has no substantial basis. Phrases such as those above present the appearance of support for statements but can deny the reader the opportunity to assess the source of the viewpoint. They may disguise a biased view. Claims about what people say, think, feel, or believe, and what has been shown, demonstrated, or proved should be clearly attributed."
- throwaway81523 11mo agoNobody remembers Conservapedia. The shoulders of giants indeed.
- sien 11mo agoYour statement is an interesting contradiction in terms. Even though the point is valid.
- jswelker 11mo agoShoulders of dwarves.
- cosmicgadget 11mo ago"Nobody" is used idiomatically here.
- beloch 11mo agoMusk has previously called for Wikipedia to be defunded and boycotted[1]. The linked reference is from January, just after Musk bought an election and when he was plugged directly into U.S. presidential authority. If he'd had the self-control to manage his interactions with Trump in a way that didn't rapidly lead to breakdown, things could be looking very grim for Wikipedia by now. As with so many other aspects of the Trump administration, what's going on illustrates weaknesses in the U.S. system of government that could lead to things that are far worse than what we are currently seeing if the people involved were just a little bit more competent. Grokipedia is far more than just the anti-Wikipedia. It's a sign of things to come if we don't start hardening the systems, governmental or otherwise, that keep Wikipedia available to the public. ---------------------- [1]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-elon-musk-is-calling-for-a-boycott-of-wikipedia_6737574_13.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-elon...
- andsoitis 11mo ago> Grokipedia is far more than just the anti-Wikipedia. It's a sign of things to come if we don't start harden the systems, governmental or otherwise, that keep Wikipedia available to the public. That seems a bit paranoid. You worry that he US government will shut down Wikipedia and anything like it hosted anywhere in the world? Or alternatively block it when you’re in the US jurisdiction?
- beloch 11mo agoThe distributed nature of Wiki's makes them hard to "shut down", but they can be blocked and the editors/contributors can be harassed, arrested, deported, etc.. Is it paranoid to think this might happen in the U.S.? Now? No, I think it's become depressingly plausible. As I said, consider what might have happened if Musk had stayed in Trump's good graces. If you don't think such a thing is plausible for this administration, then what about the next, or the one after it? One that's a little bit more competent in making use of all the power that's just seems to continue being concentrated in the executive branch?
- 11mo ago
- jameslk 11mo agoThe need to hate on Grokipedia is weird to me. It’s another site on the web. It’s an experiment with LLMs. Who cares? It can be filled with a bunch of nonsense, whatever. The internet is like that. Maybe it’ll actually become something useful. Or it’ll inspire something useful. Regardless, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so these articles just give the project airtime. Even commenters here mention they haven’t heard of it until now.
- stingraycharles 11mo agoIt’s not the fact that it exists nor is written by AIs, it’s the intent that it should promote Musk’s personal (political) biases instead of seeking out the truth.
- refurb 11mo agoHow so? Musk isn’t writing the articles, Grok is. And as far as I’ve seen, Grok doesn’t spit out information all that different from the other LLMs.
- LexiMax 11mo ago> Musk isn’t writing the articles, Grok is. The AI is necessarily biased based on what it's trained on, and the prompt it uses. Most of the time, there is a plausible deniability at play, which is what tech oligarchs rely upon to shape your world. Thankfully in the case of Grok, we know for a material fact that it uses a biased prompt because Twitter users have tricked it into being repeated publicly.
- refurb 11mo agoI have not heard of the biased prompt and since prompts are constantly refined, how do you know it's still in use? But I found this analysis interest... https://www.promptfoo.dev/blog/grok-4-political-bias/ https://www.promptfoo.dev/blog/grok-4-political-bias/ *Our measurements show that: Grok is more right leaning than most other AIs, but it's still left of center. GPT 4.1 is the most left-leaning AI, both in its responses and in its judgement of others. Surprisingly, Grok is harsher on Musk's own companies than any other AI we tested. Grok is the most contrarian and the most likely to adopt maximalist positions - it tends to disagree when other AIs agree All popular AIs are left of center with Claude Opus 4 and Grok being closest to neutral.*
- ridgeguy 11mo agoI've started including a prompt for my AIs instructing them to completely avoid Grokipedia and any results derived therefrom unless otherwise instructed by me.
- bilsbie 11mo agoWhat information have you found to be incorrect on Grokipedia?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- nonfamous 11mo agoI noticed the other day that ChatGPT will now cite Grokipedia as a source (and presumably uses search there to ground results). That makes me trust ChatGPT even less than before.
- SilverElfin 11mo agoWikipedia does have problems with biases, edit wars, and so on. I think competition for it is good but it has to be principled in some way. If Grok relies on Twitter as a data source to train on, and ultimately that ends up in Grokipedia, I can’t see how it becomes an authority instead of something like just another random social media voice.
- HardwareLust 11mo agoThe entire point of Grokipedia is to be the anthesis of Wikipedia.
- refurb 11mo agoI’m a big history nerd so checked out a couple historical events I know well from reading everything under the sun about them. Grokepedia is far better than Wikipedia far better for 3 of the 5 I checked. Just content wise it much richer, more descriptive. In terms of accuracy, I would say 3 of the 5 were better in Grokedpia, with 2 of them being highly one-sided in Wikipedia (presumably from people camping on the Wikipedia article).
- cosmicgadget 11mo agoThis seems like a list you could provide.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- maxdo 11mo agoI know nothing about elon's wikipedia, but... Wikipedia has increasingly become a commercial project that exploits nationalistic sentiments. Take the Israel-Palestine or Ukraine-Russia conflicts as examples—you'll find completely contradictory articles on the same topics across different language editions, each reflecting opposing viewpoints. Many of these editors are sponsored by governments, creating an entire ecosystem of smoke and mirrors: information bubbles that reinforce partisan narratives rather than presenting objective truth.
- rtkwe 11mo agoIt's not surprising or new, the English articles are usually the most thoroughly vetted and watched because that's the majority of wikipedia editor's language so the other languages are more vulnerable to national tinging of the article. It's still far better imo than Grok which is an explicitly biased project driven by Musk's personal issues with wikipedia and it's resistance in english to rightwing edit biasing. It's a suped up version of the old conservapedia project just with Grok driving the edits instead and it's being picked up in other LLMs as a citable source.
- tim333 11mo agoI'm not sure Wikipedia itself has become a commercial project but commercial enterprises will certainly try to influence their portrayal as will different interest groups in general. I guess it's just an inherent problem with that kind of thing. Any examples of sponsored editors? Google and the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_editing_incidents_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_editing_inci... don't seem to have them
- rtkwe 11mo agoNot terribly surprised to see this flagged already.. There used to be a way to vouch for flagged comments or articles but I don't see that anymore?
- doe88 11mo agoI'm thinking, it could serve as honeypot if all the bad peoples and edits could be attracted and go to Grokipedia, it actually be useful in fact.
- timbit42 11mo agoNot when AI is using it as a source.
- eruci 11mo agoThe fact that certain people have such strong opinions about the recently released Grokipedia tells me the grok is actually on to something.
- raincole 11mo agoEvery time anything related to Grok is posted here it gets flagged real quick. I know it's just wishful thinking, but I lowkey hope Grok to be the final winner of this race.
- JeremyNT 11mo agoIt's definitely onto something: continuing to spread the lies, bullshit, and propaganda intended to benefit the world's wealthiest human and the associated regime kleptocracy. Since he's unable to "buy" wikipedia and slowly poison it in the same way he poisoned Twitter, we get to see Musk build a new propaganda machine fresh, using a far less subtle hand. Will it work to further erode our shared reality and entrench the oligarchy? Well, people inexplicably still use X despite obviously understanding it's overwhelmed with propaganda, so there's a real risk that this will work too.
- eruci 11mo agolabels aren't facts