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We certainly wouldn’t blame you for having completely forgotten that last year, Elon Musk tried to reinvent Wikipedia because he thought it was too woke.
In October, his AI startup xAI launched Grokipedia, named after its AI chatbot. The encyclopedia stole human-written and edited pages from Wikipedia wholesale and ran them through a large language model, which also fielded user-submitted edits, to better reflect Musk’s contorted worldviews.
The site was hardly an exemplary of objectivity. It was quickly found to heavily cite an infamous neo-Nazi forum as a source of information, desperately tried to paint Tesla’s Cybertruck as a successful and desirable electric pickup truck, and validated Musk’s favorite conspiracy theories. But it was a major cultural moment, garnering countless stories in the media and discussions on podcasts over Musk’s attempt to control the spread of information.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the desperate attempt to twist the largest online encyclopedia in human history into an extension of an almost-trillionaire’s bigoted mind appears to have ground to a screeching halt — and, damningly, barely anybody seems to have noticed.
According to a new investigation by Lawfare, Grokipedia appears to have entirely stopped updating itself sometime earlier this year. Reviewing suggested edits from humans has also ground to a halt.
“As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months,” Lawfare concluded of the site, which is now owned by SpaceX since it merged with Musk’s AI efforts.
Worse yet, the site’s edit log appears to have broken completely as well, making it impossible to track which user-suggested changes were “accepted” or “rejected” by the AI.
By January, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism had already observed that xAI’s Grok was making more edits to its own articles than acting on human-suggested ones, suggesting a bottoming out of interest for the project.
Since then, it has turned into a ghost town, a completely redundant and misinformation-filled copy of Wikipedia, which remains one of the last bastions of human-edited and verified sources of information on the internet.
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