‘I think this is historic. I think that what the xAI team has done is impressive,’ Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger told NR.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s new Wikipedia alternative is garnering praise from conservatives for its entries on hot-button political topics that offer a stark contrast to Wikipedia’s leftward tilt.
Musk’s Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia developed with artificial intelligence, debuted this week and immediately drew attention because of its entries on contentious subjects including the Covid-19 pandemic, gender ideology, and Zionism.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, a critic of what the site has become, compared several high-profile Wikipedia and Grokipedia entries in his blog post about his first impressions of Grokipedia. His post compares several article introductions with assistance from ChatGPT. With five being the most biased, Wikipedia’s average bias rating is 3.1 compared to 2.1 for Grokipedia.
Sanger measured introductions to entries about the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal, Yahweh, Donald Trump, cultural Marxism, Covid-19 origins, Gamergate, the January 6 Capitol riot, alternative medicine, white privilege, 2002 Gujarat violence, and the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.
He gave Grokipedia a “C” grade initially, but considers it a very promising development.
“I think this is historic. I think that what the xAI team has done is impressive,” Sanger told National Review in an interview.
“It’s not merely a copy of Wikipedia, it has shown that it is possible to, if not improve on Wikipedia with AI, it’s at least possible to provide an alternative to Wikipedia. And it’s a meaningful alternative,” Sanger said.
Sanger noted to NR that the Grokipedia article about him was comprehensive in scope but contained some factual inaccuracies, as do news reports about him that the article cited. He expects other AI-generated encyclopedias to be developed in the future, potentially jeopardizing the existence of human-generated ones.
A major difference between Musk’s internet encyclopedia and Wikipedia is the breadth of sourcing. For parts of Sanger’s entry, Grokipedia utilizes Christian and conservative sources that Wikipedia’s perennial sources page would consider unreliable and out of bounds. The left-wing bias of Wikipedia’s list of reliable sources was part of Sanger’s blistering manifesto for reforming Wikipedia.
Musk launched Grokipedia after floating the idea in response to Sanger’s viral manifesto. Critiques of Wikipedia bias are not new for conservatives, who regularly call out the entrenched bias in the website’s current events entries.
Two Grokipedia articles that stood out instantly to users were those on the origins of Covid-19 and the Great Barrington Declaration, a public statement from three prominent epidemiologists criticizing harsh pandemic lockdowns.
Wikipedia’s perspective on the Great Barrington Declaration is harshly critical of the declaration’s contents and cites numerous critiques from public health authorities. Grokipedia’s entry presents more details about what the declaration advocated for and notes that subsequent scientific research validated some of the statement’s positions on Covid-19 policy.
“I just read the current grokipedia article on the Great Barrington Declaration. It’s balanced & almost entirely factually accurate (though it still has me as Stanford prof.). Wikipedia, by contrast, is biased, bordering on libelous,” National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya posted on X.
A former Stanford professor, Bhattacharya famously opposed stringent lockdowns and was one of the three epidemiologists to sign the Great Barrington Declaration.
Wikipedia’s Covid-19 origins entry puts the lab-leak theory under an “unlikely scenarios” tab and claims no “direct public evidence” has been released to support “speculations” about it. Meanwhile, Grokipedia presents Covid-19 origins as an “unresolved debate” between the natural spillover theory and the lab-leak theory.
The introduction to Grokipedia’s entry acknowledges the arguments for both theories and ongoing divides within the U.S. intelligence community. Its Wikipedia counterpart only presents arguments for the zoonotic spillover theory in the introduction. The Grokipedia entry also acknowledges the initial suppression of the lab leak, a topic Wikipedia’s Covid-origins entry hardly touches on.
Wikipedia’s critical approach extends to its entries on topics related to Israel and Zionism, in contrast with Grokipedia’s more neutral framing. The introduction to Wikipedia’s entry on the Zionist movement claims the founders of Israel wanted to create a Jewish state “in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible,” with less emphasis on the Biblical and historical claims Jewish people had to the land. It attributes the arrival of Zionists to Israel as the beginning of the longstanding conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Grokipedia introduction to its Zionism entry places greater emphasis on Jewish claims to the land and Arab resistance to co-existence. Grokipedia also notes the Zionist achievement of building a successful modern state and taking in millions of Jewish refugees in the process.
A similar dynamic can be found in Wikipedia’s entry on Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Wikipedia’s introduction places considerable emphasis on allegations of an Israeli genocide against Palestinians and cites the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health for casualty data. Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia’s introduction mentions Israel’s targeted attacks and civilian warnings, in addition to Hamas’s rejection of Israel’s existence and tactical decision to operate in urban areas.
“The goal of Grok and Grokipedia.com is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will never be perfect, but we shall nonetheless strive towards that goal,” Musk said on X.
Other users also commented on the accuracy of Grokipedia’s entries upon first glance.
“Just looked up myself on Grokipedia and was shocked at how thoughtful, comprehensive, and brutally honest the article was. None of the dumb factual errors of Wikipedia,” said former Representative Peter Meijer (R., Mich.).
Grokipedia remains in its infancy with less than 1 million articles available for the time being. With Wikipedia’s dominance and hard-earned reputation intact, it remains to be seen whether Musk’s alternative will seriously challenge its status as the internet’s front page.