Elon Musk’s Gurupedia points to far-right talking points
On Monday, Ilan Musk’s xAI startup launched Grokipedia, which the billionaire touts as an alternative to the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Musk first announced the project in late September on his X social media platform, saying it was a “massive improvement over Wikipedia” and “a necessary step toward xAI’s goal of understanding the world.”
Musk said last week that he was delaying the launch of Gurupedia because his team needed to “do more work to clean up ads.” When Grokipedia was finally taken down on Monday, WIRED was initially unable to access the website and received an automated message that it had been blocked.
When we finally got around to it, WIRED found that the online encyclopedia contained lengthy entries created by artificial intelligence. While many of the pages WIRED saw on launch day seemed almost Wikipedia-like in tone and content, a number of key Wikipedia entries condemned the mainstream media, highlighted conservative views, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.
Grokipedia’s entry on African American slavery in the United States includes a section that outlines several “ideological justifications” for slavery, including a “change from necessary evil to positive good.” The end of the entry focuses on criticisms of Project 1619, which it says has wrongly defined “slavery as the central engine of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural development.”
Entries of recent historical events center conservative views. When WIRED searched for “gay marriage” on Grokipedia, no entries appeared, but one of the suggestions on the screen was “gay pornography.” This Grokipedia entry falsely states that the proliferation of porn fueled the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
Grokipedia claims: “This is the start of a devastating crisis that disproportionately affects gay male communities, where idealized behaviors in pornography—such as unprotected receptive anal intercourse and multiple unknown partners—are directly aligned with primary transmission pathways and lead to rapid rates of seroconversion.”
xAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Grokipedia entry for “transgender” contains two mentions of “transgender”, a term commonly used to denigrate trans people. The entry also refers to trans women as “biologically male” who have “raised significant conflicts, primarily over risks to women’s safety, privacy, and gender-based protections created to reduce male-perpetrated violence.” The opening section highlights social media as a potential “contagion” that increases the number of trans people.
