Musk’s Grokipedia relies on ‘questionable’ sources, study says

Elon Musk’s Glocipedia contains thousands of citations to “questionable” and “questionable” sources, raising questions about the AI-powered encyclopedia’s credibility as an information tool, US researchers said on Friday.

Last month, Musk’s company xAI launched Grokipedia to compete with Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a human-created, crowdsourced information repository that billionaires and the American right-wing have repeatedly accused of ideological bias.

“It is clear that the procurement guardrails on Grokipedia have largely been lifted,” Cornell University researchers Harold Triedman and Alexios Manzarlis said in a report obtained by AFP.

“This results in the inclusion of questionable sources and an overall higher prevalence of potentially problematic sources.”

The study, which collected hundreds of thousands of Glocipedia articles, said this trend was especially pronounced for topics about elected officials and controversial political topics.

Grokipedia’s entry on the “Clinton body count,” a widely debunked conspiracy theory linking multiple deaths to former President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, cites InfoWars, a far-right website notorious for spreading misinformation.

Other Grokipedia articles cite right-wing media in the United States and India, state media in China and Iran, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim sites, and portals accused of promoting pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, the report said.

“Glocipedia cites these sources without qualification of their reliability.”

The study found that Grokipedia articles often “contain exact copies of text” from Wikipedia, and that the site aims to surpass that.

It found that Glokipedia articles not attributed to Wikipedia were 3.2 times more likely to cite sources deemed “generally unreliable” by the English Wikipedia community than articles on rival platforms.

It added that it was 13 times more likely to include “blacklisted” sources, which are blocked by Wikipedia.

“Reliability”

When AFP asked xAI for comment, it generated an automated response: “Legacy media lies.”

Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of the social media platform

On Thursday, Musk said he plans to rebrand Grokipedia as “Encyclopedia Galactica” once it is “full enough” (and has a long way to go).

“Join @xAI and help us build a sci-fi version of the Library of Alexandria!” Musk wrote about X.

Musk and the US Republican Party have frequently accused Wikipedia of being biased against right-wing ideas. Last year, Musk called on X’s more than 200 million followers to stop donating to Wikipedia, dubbing the site “Walkpedia.”

In a recent interview on the BBC Science Focus podcast, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales dismissed claims that Wikipedia had a left-wing bias as “factually incorrect”, but acknowledged that its volunteer community could improve.

“Unlike Glocipedia, which relies on rapid AI-generated content with limited transparency and oversight, Wikipedia’s processes are open to public review and rigorously document the sources behind every article,” Serena Deckelman, Wikimedia Foundation’s chief product and technology officer, told AFP.

“It is precisely this intentional openness and community model that maintains the neutrality and trustworthiness essential to a global encyclopedia. No single person, company, or agenda can influence its work.”

© 2025 AFP