Study Reveals Thousands of Questionable Sources in Musk's Grokipedia, Raising Serious Reliability Concerns

US researchers have identified thousands of citations from "questionable" and "problematic" sources in Elon Musk's Grokipedia, casting significant doubt on the reliability of this AI-powered encyclopedia as a trusted information resource.

Launched last month by Musk's xAI company, Grokipedia aims to compete with Wikipedia, the human-authored crowdsourced information platform that Musk and others on the American right have repeatedly criticized for alleged ideological bias.

"Sourcing guardrails have largely been lifted on Grokipedia," stated Cornell Tech researchers Harold Triedman and Alexios Mantzarlis in their comprehensive report reviewed by AFP. "This results in the inclusion of questionable sources, and an overall higher prevalence of potentially problematic sources."

The research, which analyzed hundreds of thousands of Grokipedia articles, revealed this trend was especially prominent in entries related to elected officials and controversial political topics.

For instance, Grokipedia's article on the widely debunked "Clinton body count" conspiracy theory cites InfoWars, a far-right website known for spreading misinformation.

Additional citations throughout Grokipedia include American and Indian right-wing media outlets, Chinese and Iranian state media, anti-immigration sites, antisemitic or anti-Muslim platforms, and sources accused of promoting pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Notably, "Grokipedia cites these sources without qualifying their reliability," the report emphasized.

The study also discovered that many Grokipedia articles contain "exactly identical copies of text" from Wikipedia, the very platform it intends to surpass.

Articles on Grokipedia not attributed to Wikipedia are 3.2 times more likely to cite sources deemed "generally unreliable" by the English Wikipedia community and 13 times more likely to include "blacklisted" sources blocked by Wikipedia.

When AFP requested comment from xAI, they received an automated response stating: "Legacy Media Lies."

Musk, who is the world's richest person and owner of social media platform X, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in US President Donald Trump's election campaign. He has claimed that Grokipedia's mission is "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

On Thursday, Musk announced plans to rebrand Grokipedia as "Encyclopedia Galactica" when it is "good enough (long way to go)." He encouraged followers on X to "Join @xAI to help build the sci-fi version of the Library of Alexandria!"

Musk and the Republican Party have frequently accused Wikipedia of bias against right-wing perspectives. Last year, Musk urged his more than 200 million X followers to stop donating to Wikipedia, referring to it as "Wokepedia."

In a recent BBC Science Focus podcast interview, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales rejected claims of left-wing bias as "factually incorrect," while acknowledging room for improvement within its volunteer community.

Selena Deckelmann, chief product and technology officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, told AFP: "Unlike Grokipedia, which relies on rapid AI-generated content with limited transparency and oversight, Wikipedia's processes are open to public review and rigorously document the sources behind every article. It is precisely this deliberate openness and community model that upholds the neutrality and trustworthiness essential for a global encyclopedia: no single individual, company, or agenda can exert influence over the work."