Grokipedia, Elon Musk’s attempt at creating an alternative to Wikipedia, is now live. Early analysis suggests that the site — powered by Musk’s xAI and fact-checked by Grok, the company’s right-leaning AI assistant — is already a sort of self-sustaining nuclear reaction of misinformation.

More than anything, though, Grokipedia represents another front of Musk’s war on wokeness and another example of Musk taking a thing that works — in this case, Wikipedia — creating a broken version of it, and declaring the battle won.

If Musk gets his way and Grokipedia does become a real Wikipedia competitor, the average internet user faces a problem. We’ve already seen how Musk can flex his wealth and power to turn one platform, X, into a misinformation machine. Creating a repository of that misinformation, one that might train xAI’s model or even competing AI models, is bound to accelerate its spread.

It’s not just that Grokipedia might be bad. It might make the rest of the web worse with it.

The road to Grokipedia

Grokipedia appears to use Wikipedia as its primary source, but injects some far-right politics and conspiracy theories into certain topics before presenting the information as fact. There are currently no photos and no links, which makes the whole thing look a bit like the results of a chatbot prompt, which it effectively is. Grokipedia is also roughly seven times smaller than Wikipedia. But this is just version v0.1, and Musk says, “Version 1.0 will be 10x better.”

I was quite surprised to see there was no article for “apartheid,” but if you looked up “white genocide theory” — one of Musk’s ideological obsessions and the........

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