Grokipedia claims to be 'a massive improvement over Wikipedia' but sure loves to copy its homework

Grokipedia, xAI'sAI-powered online encyclopaedia, is now live. Version 0.1 features an extremely basic white-text-on-a-black-background look and stripped back page layouts, plus more than 885,000 articles.

But despite Elon Musk's recent claim that Grokipedia "will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia," much of the content seems to have come directly from it (via The Verge). In addition to a number of pages seemingly copied across verbatim, you'll also see a disclaimer that reads, "The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License" at the bottom of many Grokipedia articles.

In a statement to The Verge, Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson Lauren Dickinson commented, "Wikipedia’s knowledge is–and always will be–human. Through open collaboration and consensus, people from all backgrounds build a neutral, living record of human understanding–one that reflects our diversity and collective curiosity. This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist."

To dig a little deeper, Grokipedia's article about this here fine publication is one such page featuring that aforementioned disclaimer at the bottom. However, Grokipedia isn't just copy and pasting Wikipedia content. For instance, Grokipedia says the PC Gamer "magazine has several regional editions, with the UK and US editions being the best selling PC games magazines in their respective countries as of 2024." But this is a straightforward misrepresentation of the Wikipedia sources it's cribbed from, one of which is a press kit concerning the US version of the mag from 2007.

To be fair to Grokipedia, this isn't really the highest quality source for Wikipedia to be citing either. When almost anyone can contribute to an online encyclopedia, not all contributions are created equal, after all. However, the Wikipedia article doesn't contextualise the claim with a specific timeframe outside of the citation footnote. So, why Grokipedia then anchors the statement with 'as of 2024,' I can't say—that's a fresh mistake that's all Grokipedia's own as far as I can see.

Multiple lengthy paragraphs short: Grokipedia looks to be copying Wikipedia's homework—but badly. Worse still, the claim at the top of the page that Grok 'fact-checked' its PC Gamer article three days ago does not exactly fill me with confidence either.

As you may already be aware, Large Language Model based AIs sometimes have a tenuous grasp of factual information and tend to 'hallucinate'. To put it much less generously, a lot of text-based AI will readily make stuff up because it's only trying to guess which word is most likely to come next and it doesn't actually understand what it's saying. Sometimes this results in a funny but wrong cheese 'fact', and sometimes it will take the form of ChatGPT claiming you committed a number of horrific, made-up crimes when you search your name.

As for Grok itself, there was also the whole "MechaHitler" episode back in July. Musk claimed shortly after that these concerning responses from Grok had since been addressed. Still, I'm left to wonder what sort of oversight Grokipedia enjoys? Has xAI deployed a team of editors to make sure Grok doesn't go rogue again? Is Grokipedia even attempting to approach the subject matter of its 885,000 articles from a neutral point of view? This report from The Atlantic claims not—and for that reason, I'll continue to take my chances with Wikipedia and its fleet of volunteer editors instead.

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