Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points

Monday, Elon Musk’s xAI startup has launched Grokipedia, which the billionaire touts as an AI-generated alternative to the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Musk first announced the project in late September on his social media platform

Musk said last week that he delayed the launch of Grokipedia because his team needed to “do more work to purge the propaganda.” When Grokipedia was finally abandoned on Monday, WIRED was unable to access the website and received an automated message saying it was blocked.

When we finally gained access, WIRED discovered that the online encyclopedia contained lengthy AI-generated entries. While many of the pages seen by WIRED on launch day appeared quite similar to those on Wikipedia in tone and content, a number of notable Grokipedia entries denounced mainstream media, promoted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.

The Grokipedia article on the slavery of African Americans in the United States includes a section describing many of the “ideological justifications” put forward for slavery, including the “shift from necessary evil to positive good.” The end of the article focuses on criticisms of the 1619 Project, which it says incorrectly presents “slavery as the central engine of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural development.”

Entries on more recent historical events place conservative perspectives at the center. When WIRED searched Grokipedia for “gay marriage,” no entry came up, but one of the suggestions on screen was instead for “gay pornography.” This entry in Grokipedia falsely states that the proliferation of pornography exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

“This marked the beginning of what would become a devastating crisis disproportionately affecting gay men’s communities, where behaviors idealized in pornography – such as unprotected receptive anal sex and multiple anonymous partners – aligned directly with primary transmission routes, leading to rapid seroconversion rates,” the Grokipedia entry states.

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 men” who have “generated significant conflict, primarily centered on risks to women’s safety, privacy, and gender-based protections established to mitigate violence perpetrated by men.” The opening section highlights social media as a potential “contagion” that increases the number of trans people.