Infowars can easily be a point of reference on the tech billionaire's anti-Wikipedia site, which is not very surprising given that Grokipedia also highlights the “empirical basis” of the “white genocide” conspiracy theory.

Elon Musk announced at the end of October the launch of version 0.1 of an online encyclopedia called Grokipedia, which he believes is already much better than the well-known Wikipedia. He justified the move by saying that the new encyclopedia will eliminate propaganda. Version 0.2 has been in use since December, and contains more than six million AI-generated articles.

“Grokipedia will exceed Wikipedia by several orders of magnitude in breadth, depth and accuracy”

Musk wrote on X after the encyclopedia was launched.

Musk's supporters refer to Wikipedia as “Wokepedia” because they believe that the most widely used online encyclopedia often reflects left-wing views. Musk was encouraged to launch Grokipedia among others by Donald Trump's tech advisor David Sacks, who complained that Wikipedia is “so biased” and “hyperpartisan” .

According to Carolina Flores, an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Santa Cruz, in light of recent research examining the spread of false information online, Grokipedia will probably not be harmful in terms of misleading the general public, as users who do not support Musk or actively oppose his political views are unlikely to trust Grokipedia and will not rely on it. What is more worrying though is that a small but growing group of far-right supporters may find new ways to rationalize their views using Grokipedia, which could make them even more daring and extreme.

Grokipedia vs. Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the community-edited online encyclopedia, was launched in 2001 and has received a lot of criticism over the years due to the fact that it can be freely edited, and thus incorrect information can also be posted on the site.

It's true that anyone can edit Wikipedia, but the content uploaded by users must comply with the site's rules, including being verifiable based on reliable sources. Personal opinions, beliefs, or personal experiences, unverified research, defamatory material, and content that violates copyrights are not allowed on the site.

Over the years, several studies have explored the neutrality of English Wikipedia articles. In the context of American politics, the results show that the encyclopedia's articles are mostly centrist, with a slight bias to the left or the right.

A 2019 study conducted among American users of the English-language Wikipedia found that

The community of Wikipedia editors does indeed consider certain right-wing media outlets to be unreliable, but they also regularly cite numerous right-wing publications as sources that follow strict fact-checking rules, and they evaluate left-wing newspapers according to the same principles.

The biggest difference between Wikipedia and Musk's Grokipedia is in the creation and editing of articles: while Wikipedia articles can be edited, corrected, and expanded with new developments by users, Grokipedia articles are written by Musk's generative artificial intelligence model, Grok. Users cannot edit articles, only registered members can make suggestions, which are reviewed by Grok.

The articles on both sites are structured similarly, with a clean design and subsections, and both include a list of sources at the end of each entry.

Musk said on the All-In tech podcast that he had asked his company, xAI, to have its chatbot Grok review the top one million articles on Wikipedia, then supplement or modify them, and delete any incorrect parts.

“That means research the rest of the internet, whatever that's publicly available, and correct the Wikipedia articles, fix mistakes, but also add a lot more context”

Musk said during the podcast on October 31, 2025.

For this reason, Grokipedia articles contain the caption “fact-checked by Grok” and indicate how many weeks ago the “check” happened.

Unreliable sources, factual errors, and extreme opinions

By mid-January, after two and a half months of operation, Grokipedia already had more than six million articles.

PolitiFact found that Grokipedia articles often originate almost entirely from Wikipedia, and when entries differ, the quality and sources of Grokipedia's information are problematic, making it a less reliable source of data.

“Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist”

Selena Decklemann, chief product and technology officer at the Wikimedia Foundation said to PolitiFact.

AI frequently updates Grokipedia articles, and while many entries were indeed similar to Wikipedia articles at the beginning, after more than two months of operation, the differences are becoming increasingly obvious.

Cornell University conducted the first comprehensive study of Grokipedia already in November. They found that articles about elected officials and controversial topics showed fewer similarities between Wikipedia and Grokipedia than randomly selected articles, which typically covered non-political topics.

such as the neo-nazi website Stormfront, which was cited 42 times, the conspiracy theory website Infowars, which was cited 34 times, the white supremacist website VDARE, which was cited 107 times, and the Islamophobic website jihadwatch, which was cited 73 times as a source in Elon Musk's encyclopedia at the time of the Cornell study.

Of course, these references only represent a small fraction of the sources used by Grokipedia. Similar to Wikipedia, Musk's encyclopedia also regularly uses the most widely read mainstream English-language publications, such as The New York Times and the BBC. However, a crucial difference is that Wikipedia categorizes sources—from reliable to blacklisted—, and of the extreme websites mentioned, Infowars, VDARE, and jihadwatch are listed as unreliable and/or blacklisted. When using unreliable websites, Wikipedia sends a warning message to the editor, and in the case of blacklisted sites, linking is not allowed and is technically blocked.

The Guardian asked Richard Evans, a researcher of the Third Reich, to test Grokipedia. According to Evans, Musk's encyclopedia faces a very real problem: “Comments shared in chatrooms are given the same status as serious academic pieces. Artificial intelligence simply absorbs everything.” He noted that the site repeated lies and distortions in its entry on Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and war minister, that earlier had been spread by Speer himself, even though these had already been corrected in an award-winning biography published in 2017.

Musk's own biography is also an interesting example. As The Atlantic pointed out, Grokipedia does not mention his maternal grandfather Joshua N. Haldeman, who openly proclaimed his racist and anti-democratic views, and he does not even have his own entry on Grokipedia. Wikipedia's article on Elon Musk mentions his grandfather but not his views. However, a separate article on Musk's grandfather does mention these views.

“White genocide” is a conspiracy theory that claims that white people are being deliberately eliminated through migration and forced assimilation. Grokipedia presents this not as a conspiracy theory, but simply as a theory (archive). After a few sentences, the article outlines the “empirical basis” for the claim that white people are being exterminated worldwide. Later in the entry, it is said that despite data on population trends, the media and academic circles tend to label the theory as an extreme conspiracy theory due to their ideological bias in favor of multiculturalism.

Furthermore, Grokipedia does not acknowledge (archive) that the Pizzagate political conspiracy theory is completely unfounded. The article mentions articles by Snopes and Politifact on the subject as “fact-checking efforts”, but according to Grokipedia, these did not contain any conclusive evidence.

As we wrote earlier on Lakmusz, the Pizzagate theory spread in 2016 when the email account of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager was hacked and Wikileaks published his correspondence. Conspiracy theorists began searching for secret codes in the messages. One such code was the phrase “cheese pizza”, especially in alt-right circles: they believed that the clues led to the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., where prominent Democratic politicians were involved in human trafficking and operating a pedophile ring. The pizzeria's owner and employees received death threats, and on one occasion a man opened fire in the restaurant. The conspiracy theory continued to spread even after the pizzeria's owner said that the restaurant did not have a basement at all.

Cover illustration: Annamari Dezső