Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Promotes Far-Right Perspectives

On Monday, Elon Musk’s xAI startup unveiled Grokipedia, which the billionaire touts as an AI-generated substitute for the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Musk initially revealed the project in late September on his social media platform X, claiming it would be “a massive improvement over Wikipedia,” and “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”

Last week, Musk stated he postponed the launch of Grokipedia because his team needed “to do more work to purge out the propaganda.” When Grokipedia was finally released on Monday, WIRED found itself temporarily unable to access the site and received an automated response indicating it was blocked.

Upon gaining access, WIRED discovered that the online encyclopedia featured extensive entries produced by AI. While many pages observed on launch day mirrored Wikipedia in tone and content, several significant Grokipedia entries criticized mainstream media, underscored conservative perspectives, and at times, propagated historical inaccuracies.

The Grokipedia entry regarding the enslavement of African Americans in the US includes a section detailing various “ideological justifications” for slavery, such as the “Shift from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.” The conclusion of the entry addresses criticisms of The 1619 Project, which it asserts misrepresented “slavery as the central engine of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural development.”

Entries covering more recent historical events center around conservative viewpoints. When WIRED searched for “gay marriage” in Grokipedia, no entry appeared, but one of the on-screen suggestions was “gay pornography.” This entry erroneously claims that the rise of porn intensified the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

“This marked the onset of what would become a devastating crisis disproportionately affecting gay male communities, where behaviors idealized in pornography—such as unprotected receptive anal intercourse and multiple anonymous partners—aligned directly with primary transmission routes, leading to rapid seroconversion rates,” asserts the Grokipedia entry.

xAI did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

The Grokipedia entry for “transgender” includes two mentions of “transgenderism,” a term often used pejoratively against trans individuals. The entry also classifies trans women as “biological males” who have “generated significant conflicts, primarily centered on risks to women’s safety, privacy, and sex-based protections established to mitigate male-perpetrated violence.” The introductory section depicts social media as a potential “contagion” contributing to the increase in the number of trans individuals.