Two sexes, more intelligent races and lots of controversy: Elon Musk widens the culture war with his Grokipedia | Technology

Elon Musk launched this Tuesday Grokipedia, his personal and conservative alternative to Wikipedia written with artificial intelligence. Its name comes from Grok, the chatbots created by xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company. “Grokipedia’s goal is to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will never be perfect, but we will strive to achieve this goal nonetheless,” Musk wrote on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.

The appearance of Grokipedia is minimalist and similar to that of Wikipedia, with an index of the parts of longer entries. It can also be edited: you need to select the supposedly incorrect phrase, marked “It’s wrong” (that’s wrong) and add the fix along with a link that supports the edit. Each user can register in Grokipedia with their own username and password

Musk’s intention is to offer a more conservative and less approach woke up on some of today’s most controversial issues, such as climate change, immigration or race. It’s a new front in the culture war in which Musk is participating.

Grok currently has less than a million articles, in English alone. The English Wikipedia has more than 7 million. Musk announced that this version is only 0.1 and that when the next ones arrive it will be more complete, he promised. There is no information whether Grokipedia will soon be available in languages ​​other than English. The Grokipedia “.es” domain is not owned by Musk.

Controversial debates

X became this Tuesday morning a festival of controversial examples from Grokipedia. This is how, for example, the entry “gender” begins: “Gender refers to the binary classification of human beings into men or women according to biological sex.” While on Wikipedia it begins like this: “Gender is the set of social, psychological, cultural and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), a woman (or girl) or a third gender”.

Or George Floyd, the victim whose death gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement: “George Perry Floyd Jr. was an American with a long criminal record, which included convictions for armed robbery, drug possession and theft in Texas between 1997 and 2007.” His Wikipedia entry begins like this: “George Perry Floyd Jr. was an African American man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store employee suspected Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, on May 25, 2020.

Grokipedia also gets into seemingly bygone debates like race and intelligence: “In the United States, meta-analyses of numerous studies show consistent average differences in IQ across different racial groups: White Americans typically score around 100, African Americans around 85, Hispanics around 90, and East Asians around 105, while Ashkenazi Jews typically score above 110.” Wikipedia does not go into any of these numbers or allow for an outdated debate: “Since the advent of IQ tests in the early 20th century, differences in average performance have been observed between different racial groups, although these differences have fluctuated and, in many cases, steadily decreased over time.”

Grokipedia also goes into more remote territory, such as whether Yasuke, an African companion of a Jesuit in Japan in the 16th century, actually ended up being a samurai or not.

The differences with Wikipedia don’t end there. Artificial intelligence is famous for its hallucinations and there are people who complain about how it invented facts in their lives, such as Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia although now in conflict with his former colleagues, who also congratulated Musk for his initiative.

Grok clearly has a taste or eye for controversy. In the entries of, for example, Lamine Yamal or Pedro Almodóvar, there are several paragraphs of criticism and comments on their personal life or cultural criticism that Wikipedia barely includes. Then there are surprising absences in this initial version, such as Rosalía, although there are other famous Spaniards such as Rafa Nadal, Alexia Putellas, Pedro Sánchez or Javier Bardem.

References will be another possible battleground. The Wikipedia entry for Christopher Columbus or Columbus Day in the United States does not mention Donald Trump or the more recent controversy over that celebration. This is the second sentence of the Grokipedia snippet: “Presidents continue to issue statements reaffirming the importance of this date, and in 2025 Donald Trump went further: He openly criticized “left-wing radicals” for attempting to tarnish Columbus’s legacy as an explorer and symbol of Western civilization.”

In a statement published in The limit A spokesperson for Wikimedia, the promoters of Wikipedia, defends humanity and its collaborative work: “Wikipedia knowledge is – and always will be – human. This knowledge created by humans is what AI companies use to generate content; Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist too.” They also insist that Wikipedia has no specific point of view: “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting any particular point of view.”

Wikipedia already has “Grokipedia” entries in 23 languages. In English it has a small section on “disinformation”. Grokipedia also obviously has its own “Wikipedia” entry with a long chapter on “threats to its credibility” in 2024-25. Grokipedia is not yet indexed by Google, so it does not appear in searches. You must access it via your website.

Musk’s battle against Wikipedia has milestones such as his alleged Nazi salute, which the collaborative platform picks up as a minor note. Musk even renamed it “Wokepedia,” in contempt for its seemingly progressive ideas. These criticisms also dovetail with his regular attacks on mainstream media. For Musk, Wikipedia considers media information to be true or valid and is “an extension of their propaganda.”