Grokipedia repeatedly cites white supremacist websites, Cornell researchers find

Elon Musk's anti-woke Wikipedia rival, Grokipedia, is pulling information from widely blacklisted sources and known neo-Nazi sites, according to two researchers.

The analysis, "What did Elon change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia," was conducted by two Cornell Tech researchers and has yet to be peer reviewed. It's the first attempt to comprehensively scrape the site's entries which numbered more than 880,000 at the time. As of publishing, Grokipedia v0.2 hosts 1,016,241 articles.

They found that the website frequently cited blacklisted sources and sites deemed low-quality by academics, including Stormfront. Stormfront is considered the first major hate site on the Internet and the most popular forum for white nationalists, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC). It was founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black in 1995, and long hosted white supremacist, neo-Nazi message boards.

In addition, researchers found Grokipedia cited far-right conspiracy peddler Infowars 34 times, and pulled from VDare, a white nationalist publication designated as as a hate group by the SPLC, 107 times. Similar entries on Wikipedia cited mainly mainstream news publications.

"We find that the elected official and controversial article subsets showed less similarity between their Wikipedia version and Grokipedia version than other pages," the report reads. "The random subset illustrates that Grokipedia focused rewriting the highest quality articles on Wikipedia, with a bias towards biographies, politics, society, and history."

Researchers also found that, on the whole, Grokipedia articles were "longer and more verbose" than Wikipedia articles, citing twice as many sources but with a higher share of unreliable citations.

It's been less than a month since Musk launched the online encyclopedia, intended as competition to what the X CEO began calling "Wokipedia" or "Dickipedia." Musk has long criticized the nonprofit resource for having an alleged left wing bias. "Grokipedia.com version 0.1 is now live. Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo," the billionaire wrote in an X post at the time of launch. Users quickly noticed, however, that Grokipedia was plagiarizing many of its entries directly from Wikipedia, with exceptions for its more political charged articles.

Grokipedia's editorial process is not clearly outlined. Users don't appear to be able to edit articles directly on the site, but can submit suggestions which the xAI team filters. It's not apparant if the titular Grok chatbot is involved in the review system, although Musk has said it is involved in fact-checking. The chatbot has previously come under fire for spewing hate speech and praising the actions of Adolf Hitler. Musk himself has reinstated white supremacist figures on X and engaged in far-right talking points and imagery.

Conversely, Wikipedia's content and citations practices are governed by five community pillars, which include an emphasis on primary sources and general neutrality. "All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy with citations based on reliable sources, especially when the topic is controversial or is about a living person," one pillar reads. Wikipedia also discourages the use of "websites and publications expressing views that are widely acknowledged as extremist." Infowars, for example, has been deemed a deprecated source and blacklisted by Wikipedia due to persistent spamming and its reputation for publishing fake news and conspiracy theories.

"The publicly determined, community-oriented rules that try to maintain Wikipedia as a comprehensive, reliable, human-generated source are not in application on Grokipedia," report author Harold Triedman told NBC News.