Elon Musk's Grokipedia is here, and it copies Wikipedia a lot

Elon Musk's answer to Wikipedia is now here. On Monday, Musk announced that his own online encyclopedia, Grokipedia, was now live.

According to Musk, the current version of Grokipedia is only "version 0.1" but he claimed that it's already "better than Wikipedia."

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Up until a few years ago, Elon Musk frequently shared links to Wikipedia entries on X, then known as Twitter. However, since he has taken a turn into far-right politics, Musk has become a major critic of Wikipedia, claiming it has a left-wing bias. He has recently started referring to the site as "Wokipedia" and has made calls to "defund" or stop donating to Wikimedia, the nonprofit that runs the platform.

However, for supposedly being better than Wikipedia, Musk's Grokipedia appears to rip off a significant amount of content from it.

For example, as The Verge noticed, the Grokipedia entry for the Sony video game console PlayStation 5 is a complete word-for-word copy of the Wikipedia entry for PlayStation 5. Musk's Grokipedia even copied and pasted the exact same table of contents for the different sections of the PlayStation 5 entry. Even the cited external sources are the same, although it appears Grokipedia has changed the order of how they're listed.

Grokipedia did add one thing to its PlayStation 5 entry that's not found on the Wikipedia version. A disclaimer at the very bottom of the page, which admits that it "adapted" the content from Wikipedia.

"The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License," it reads. Because Wikipedia content is published under the Creative Commons public license, Grokipedia can republish its content under certain circumstances.

The copying problem appears to be extensive. We used the plagiarism detection service Copyscape to check the Grokipedia entry for the Titanic, and Copyscape found that 18 percent of the page, or about 3,600 words, were copied word-for-word from Wikipedia. At the top of Grokipedia's entry, it contains this notice: "Fact-checked by Grok yesterday."

That suggests that Grokipedia is intended more as a fact-checking tool than a genuine alternative to Wikipedia.

Unlike Wikipedia, which has human editors who volunteer to contribute to the site, Musk's Grok AI is responsible for the content that gets posted on Grokipedia. And it seems that in many cases, Grok is just scraping Wikipedia entries in their entirety and pasting its contents on Grokipedia's own site.

Social media users are continuing to discover numerous Grokipedia entries that are lifted directly from the corresponding Wikipedia entries, often with no changes.

The Grokipedia entry for composer Franz Liszt? Plagiarized from Wikipedia. The Grokipedia entry for the Miller Effect? Copied sentence-by-sentence from the Wikipedia article. Grokipedia's page for the PC-98? Taken from Wikipedia.

One Wikipedia contributor found their own contribution to an entry was copied line-for-line and published on Grokipedia.

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So, how does Grokipedia differ from the supposedly woke Wikipedia?

Some of the more politically charged articles on Grokipedia appear to have been rewritten in order to add a right-leaning bent, but an enormous portion of Musk's Wikipedia alternative appears to just be Wikipedia itself.