Elon Musk once again locked horns with traditional media, slamming what he called “propaganda legacy publications” while defending his latest AI-driven project, Grokipedia. In a post on X, the Tesla CEO started to rant: “Wired, The Atlantic, Guardian and many other propaganda legacy publications would die immediately if they had to support themselves. Donations from far left organisations disguised as charities are what keep them alive.” Musk claimed that such outlets exist “simply as a means of influencing Wikipedia, Google, etc as fake ‘authoritative’ sources.” His remarks came after Wired published a critical piece titled “Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points.” The article accused Musk’s new AI-powered platform of having extremist narratives — a claim the billionaire appeared to take as a personal attack.
What is Grokipedia? Is it better than Wikipedia?
Grokipedia was launched earlier this week. It is Musk’s answer to Wikipedia, a project he has long criticised for what he calls “editorial bias.” Musk announced the launch, writing, “Grokipedia.com version 0.1 is now live. Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo.” He added, “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.” However, users quickly noticed that several Grokipedia entries appeared to be adapted from Wikipedia itself. Searches for terms such as Nobel Prize and Monday carried a disclaimer reading, “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.” When one X user pointed this out, Musk acknowledged it, replying, “I know. We should have this fixed by end of year.”Musk insists Grokipedia will rely on AI-generated content “fact-checked” by his chatbot Grok. Critics argue the platform still depends on human-created knowledge. In a statement, the Wikimedia Foundation said, “Wikipedia’s knowledge is — and always will be — human… even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”
