Evolution of Truth

Billionaire Elon Musk this week launched Grokipedia, an online encyclopaedia aimed at challenging Wikipedia – which he considers too left-wing. Musk claims to be freeing knowledge from ideology, but the AI used to generate content for his new platform appears to have its own bias.

Analysis: Wikipedia aimed to make knowledge free to the public, but now Elon Musk is challenging that model. The US billionaire, who has repeatedly accused Wikipedia of left-wing bias, launched his own more “objective” online encyclopaedia, Grokipedia, on October 27.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia has become the largest free source of knowledge online, with editions in more than 300 languages that are written and updated by thousands of volunteer editors and contributors. It is funded by donations from online users.

For Musk – and more broadly for US conservatives – this compendium of knowledge is no longer a resource for learning, but a bastion of “woke” thinking that must be torn down.

In a post on his social media site X, Musk describes his new encyclopaedia as “purged of propaganda” – powered not by volunteers but by artificial intelligence.

As its name suggests, Musk is relying on Grok – the AI chatbot integrated into the X social media platform – to produce content for his new online encyclopaedia.

The Grokipedia project is a sign that Musk’s ambitions extend to trying to impose an AI-generated version of the truth. 

‘A machine for discrediting scientific and collaborative work’ 

When Musk described his biography entry on Wikipedia as “insanely inaccurate” in 2019, his criticism seemed of little consequence. But the Tesla and SpaceX boss was already showing signs of questioning the validity of the collaborative model on which Wikipedia is based. 

Co-founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger nearly 25 years ago, Wikipedia had lofty aims. As Wales wrote: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.” 

Contrary to this open-source, collaborative view of knowledge, Musk advocates a hierarchical, technological approach, where knowledge is no longer built through human collaboration, but is “purified” through algorithms. 

In the case of Grokipedia, fact-checking is done by Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot. 

Can Musk's AI-generated 'Grokipedia' be trusted?

Musk had become openly confrontational toward Wikipedia by 2023, accusing it of “taking public money to fund ideological propaganda”. In a puerile move to discredit it, he offered the platform $1 billion to change its name to “Dickipedia”. 

A year later, after buying the X social network in 2022, he asked his more than 200 million followers to stop donating to “Wokepedia”, as he called the online encyclopaedia. 

Musk baselessly claimed that the Wikimedia Foundation – the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia – was "controlled by far-left activists" and slammed it for devoting nearly $50 million of its $177 million budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year to diversity, equity and inclusion policies. 

In the summer of 2025, following a US presidential campaign during which he accused Wikipedia of misinformation and anti-conservative bias, Musk announced the launch of his own encyclopaedia. In interviews, he discussed his ambition to “purify knowledge” through technology, in contrast to the “human chaos” of Wikipedia. 

Not everyone is convinced.

Musk’s AI-based encyclopaedia “discredits scientific and collaborative work” said Anaïs Nony, a researcher on digital technologies and their impact on society at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

More than just a sign of Musk’s antipathy to Wikipedia, Grokipedia epitomises the aim “to transition from collective knowledge to algorithm-driven knowledge”, Nony says. 

The promise of ‘purified’ knowledge 

According to Musk, Grokipedia aims to produce “pure”, objective knowledge, free from human passions and compromises. 

But Nony said that “rationality is created precisely by our relationships, by the way we confront reality and change things as we go along”.

“Wikipedia is an open system, while Musk's project is closed, omnipotent, above the crowd, god-like,” she said. 

According to the Washington Post, several studies have examined potential liberal biases of Wikipedia. Some find it leans slightly to the left, while others place it in the centre in the context of US politics, and suggest that, over time, articles become more neutral thanks to revisions by contributors. 

“It is an encyclopaedia that relies on underlying sources, that gets fixed in real time, and that is constantly changing, and the sources are constantly changing,” Maryana Iskander, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, told the Washington Post. “There’s no bias on Wikipedia if one understands how it works.” 

When announcing the launch of Grokipedia, Musk repeatedly stated that “AI doesn't care about ideology, it cares about accuracy”. 

But Nony explained that in the case of an online encyclopaedia powered by artificial intelligence, the idea of any kind of neutrality is completely illusory.

“The design, deployment and functionality of a technology reflect the aspirations and values of its creator," she said. "There is no such thing as neutral technology, just as there is no such thing as neutral science. It is always biased.”

According to Nony, Musk is promoting a platform that cannot be modified by peers, which is the antithesis of what constitutes knowledge.

“The very basis of knowledge is interpretation, dialogue with peers, and confronting false results in order to arrive at better ones,” she said. 

- Author: Pauline ROUQUETTE, France24

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