On Monday, Elon Musk’s xAI startup launched Grokipedia, which the billionaire is pitching as an AI-generated alternative to the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Musk first announced the project in late September on his social media platform X, saying it would be “a massive improvement over Wikipedia,” and “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
Musk said last week that he had delayed the launch of Grokipedia because his team needed “to do more work to purge out the propaganda.” When Grokipedia eventually dropped on Monday, WIRED was initially unable to access the website and received an automated message that it was blocked.
When we finally got access to it, WIRED found that the online encyclopedia contained lengthy entries generated by AI. While many of the pages WIRED saw on launch day appeared fairly similar to Wikipedia in terms of tone and content, a number of notable Grokipedia entries denounced the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.
The Grokipedia entry about the slavery of African Americans in the US includes a section outlining numerous “ideological justifications” made for slavery, including the “Shift from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.” The end of the entry focuses on criticisms of The 1619 Project, which it says incorrectly framed “slavery as the central engine of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural development.”
Entries for more recent historical events put conservative perspectives at the center. When WIRED searched for “gay marriage” in Grokipedia, no entry popped up, but one of the on-screen suggestions was for “gay pornography” instead. This entry in Grokipedia falsely states that the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
“This marked the onset of what would become a devastating crisis disproportionately affecting gay male communities, where behaviors idealized in pornography—such as unprotected receptive anal intercourse and multiple anonymous partners—aligned directly with primary transmission routes, leading to rapid seroconversion rates,” the Grokipedia entry claims.
xAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Grokipedia entry for “transgender” includes two mentions of “transgenderism,” a term commonly used to denigrate trans people. The entry also refers to trans women as “biological males” who have “generated significant conflicts, primarily centered on risks to women’s safety, privacy, and sex-based protections established to mitigate male-perpetrated violence.” The opening section highlights social media as a potential “contagion” that is increasing the number of trans people.
