Elon Musk’s ‘Grouppedia’ promotes far-right talking points

Monday, Elon Musk Start xAI It launched Grokipedia, which the billionaire is promoting as an AI-generated alternative to Encyclopedia of Crowdsourcing Wikipedia. Musk first announced the project in late September on his social media platform

Musk said last week that he delayed Grokipedia’s launch because his team needed to “do more work to eliminate propaganda.” When Grokipedia eventually went down on Monday, WIRED was initially unable to access the site and received an automated message saying it had been blocked.

When we were finally able to access it, WIRED found that the online encyclopedia contained long entries generated by artificial intelligence. While many of the pages viewed by WIRED on launch day appeared somewhat similar to Wikipedia in tone and content, a number of prominent Grokipedia entries condemned mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and at times perpetuated historical inaccuracies.

The Grokipedia entry on African American slavery in the United States includes a section explaining several “Ideological justificationsdevoted to slavery, including “the transformation from necessary evil to positive good.” The end of the entry focuses on criticisms of the 1619 Project, which it says incorrectly positioned “slavery as a central driver of the political, economic, and cultural development of the nation.”

More recent historical events entries place conservative viewpoints at the center. When WIRED searched for “gay marriage” on Grokipedia, no entries turned up, but one of the on-screen suggestions was “gay pornography” instead. This Grokipedia entry incorrectly suggests that the spread of pornography exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

“This marked the beginning of what would become a devastating crisis disproportionately affecting gay male communities, as behaviors idealized in pornography — such as unprotected anal intercourse and anonymous multiple partners — align directly with primary transmission routes, leading to rapid seroconversion rates,” the Grokipedia entry claims.

xAI did not immediately return a request for comment.

The Grokipedia entry for “transgender” includes two mentions of “transgender,” a term commonly used for Denigration of transgender people. The entry also refers to trans women as “biological males” who have “generated significant conflicts, centered primarily on risks to women’s safety, privacy, and sex-based protections put in place to mitigate male-perpetrated violence.” The opening section highlights social media as a potential “contagion” increasing the number of transgender people.