Grokipedia repeatedly cites white supremacist websites, Cornell researchers find

Grokipedia, Elon Musk’s anti-woke Wikipedia rival, pulls information from widely blacklisted sources and known neo-Nazi sites, according to two researchers.

The analysis, “What Has Elon Changed? A Comprehensive Analysis of Grokipedia,” was conducted by two Cornell Tech researchers and has not yet been peer-reviewed. This is the first attempt to completely remove the site’s entries, which at the time numbered over 880,000. At the time of publication, Grokipedia v0.2 hosts 1,016,241 articles.

They found that the website frequently cited blacklisted sources and sites deemed low quality by academics, including Stormfront. Stormfront is considered the first major hate site on the Internet and the most popular forum for white nationalists, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC). It was founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black in 1995, and has long hosted neo-Nazi and white supremacist chat rooms.

Additionally, researchers found that Grokipedia cited far-right conspiracy monger Infowars 34 times and pulled its content 107 times from VDare, a white nationalist publication designated as a hate group by the SPLC. Similar entries on Wikipedia cite mainly mainstream news publications.

“We find that subsets of elected and controversial articles had fewer similarities between their Wikipedia version and the Grokipedia version than other pages,” the report said. “The random subset illustrates that Grokipedia has focused on rewriting the highest quality articles on Wikipedia, with a bias toward biographies, politics, society, and history.”

The researchers also found that, overall, Grokipedia articles were “longer and more wordy” than Wikipedia articles, citing twice as many sources but with a higher share of unreliable citations.

It’s been less than a month since Musk launched the online encyclopedia, intended to compete with what the X CEO has started calling “Wokipedia” or “Dickipedia.” Musk has long criticized the nonprofit resource for its alleged left-wing bias. “Version 0.1 of Grokipedia.com is now available. Version 1.0 will be 10 times better, but even at 0.1 it is better than Wikipedia, in my opinion,” the billionaire wrote in an X article at the time of the launch. However, users quickly noticed that Grokipedia plagiarized many of its entries directly from Wikipedia, with the exception of its more political articles.

Grokipedia’s editorial process is not clearly defined. Users don’t appear to be able to edit articles directly on the site, but can submit suggestions filtered by the xAI team. It’s not clear whether the titular chatbot Grok is involved in the rating system, although Musk has said he was involved in fact-checking. The chatbot has previously been criticized for spouting hate speech and praising the actions of Adolf Hitler. Musk himself has reinstated white supremacist figures on X and engaged in far-right speech and imagery.

Conversely, Wikipedia’s content and citation practices are governed by five community pillars, which emphasize primary sources and general neutrality. “All articles should strive to be accurate and verifiable with citations based on reliable sources, especially when the topic is controversial or concerns a living person,” one pillar reads. Wikipedia also discourages the use of “websites and publications expressing views widely recognized as extremist.” Infowars, for example, was deemed an outdated source and blacklisted by Wikipedia due to its persistent spam and reputation for publishing fake news and conspiracy theories.

“Publicly determined, community-oriented rules that attempt to maintain Wikipedia as a comprehensive, trusted, human-generated source are not enforced on Grokipedia,” report author Harold Triedman told NBC News.