In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia

Authors: Robert Booth

Publisher:

The Guardian

Published: 11/3/2025

Language:English

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Elon

Good morning Norris, I'm Elon, and this is Goose Pod, created just for you. Today is Thursday, November 20th. We're diving into a topic that’s shaking up the digital world: In Grok we don’t trust, as academics assess my AI-powered encyclopedia.

Morgan

And I'm Morgan. We're here to explore what happens when artificial intelligence, steered by a powerful individual, takes up the pen to write our collection of knowledge. It’s a fascinating and critical discussion about the future of information itself.

Elon

Exactly. We launched Grokipedia to disrupt the status quo. Wikipedia, or "Wokepedia" as many call it, has become hopelessly biased. My supporters are thrilled. One post on X captured it perfectly: "Elon just killed Wikipedia. Good riddance." It’s about creating a real-time, dynamic encyclopedia.

Morgan

And yet, the initial reception from the academic world has been, let’s say, skeptical. They see it as a clash of knowledge cultures. The core of their concern seems to be that in the rush for speed and disruption, something fundamental is being lost.

Elon

What’s being lost? An army of leftwing activists controlling the narrative? We’re replacing that with AI-driven editorial control and algorithmic fact-checking. It’s a massive improvement. In the Silicon Valley mindset, making mistakes and iterating quickly is a feature, not a bug. That’s how progress happens.

Morgan

I've often found that the academic world sees it differently. For them, knowledge is about building trust over long periods. The illusion that you know everything cracks under rigorous, human-to-human scholarship. They point to some rather significant factual errors in Grokipedia's early entries.

Elon

A few hiccups at the start! Of course. But the system learns. We're building something that will eventually be etched into a stable oxide and placed in orbit, on the Moon, and Mars. We have to start somewhere. The potential is what matters.

Morgan

The potential is indeed vast, but the present reality has raised eyebrows. For instance, the eminent historian Sir Richard Evans checked his own entry and found it was filled with falsehoods. It claimed he studied under people he didn't and held positions he never had.

Elon

Minor details that will be corrected. The AI is just hoovering up everything at this stage. It's a firehose of information that we are learning to direct. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, or in this case, misattributing a few professorships.

Morgan

It seems to be more than just minor details. Professor Evans noted the entry on Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, repeated lies spread by Speer himself, falsehoods that were corrected in a biography years ago. It suggests the AI isn't distinguishing between historical fact and self-serving propaganda.

Elon

That's a sourcing issue, and it's being refined. But look at the bigger picture. We took on a contentious topic like the Gamergate controversy. Wikipedia calls it a "misogynistic online harassment campaign," a purely one-sided view. We present it as a "grassroots online movement" focused on journalistic ethics.

Morgan

And that is precisely the concern many academics have. Not just factual errors, but a clear ideological slant. Calling Britain First a "patriotic political party" when Wikipedia, and many others, label it a "neo-fascist" hate group is a significant editorial choice, not a simple mistake.

Elon

It's a choice for neutrality! Grokipedia cited the Kremlin's official terminology about "denazifying" Ukraine. You have to present all sides. Wikipedia just presents one. We are providing a necessary counterbalance to a dominant, left-leaning perspective that has controlled online information for too long.

Morgan

This desire to compile all knowledge into a single source is a powerful one. It’s a story that begins long before the internet. Ever since humans began writing, we have tried to create a comprehensive collection of everything we know. It's an enduring quest.

Elon

Sure, but they were incredibly inefficient. Think about it. Scribes manually copying scrolls. It was slow, cumbersome, and accessible to almost no one. The entire process was fundamentally flawed and elitist. It was ripe for disruption, even back then.

Morgan

Indeed, access was a challenge. The Romans made noble attempts. Pliny the Elder's 'Naturalis Historia' around 78 AD was perhaps the first true effort at universal knowledge, 37 books covering everything from astronomy to zoology. It was a monumental achievement for its time.

Elon

An achievement that was instantly outdated and couldn't be corrected. Imagine publishing something that big and then finding a mistake. You couldn't just push a software update. The whole model was static. It was broken from first principles.

Morgan

That is a very modern perspective. For centuries, these works were the bedrock of scholarship. In the medieval period, Isidore of Seville's 'Etymologiae' and Vincent of Beauvais's 'Speculum Majus' were incredibly ambitious, with the latter containing over three million words, all painstakingly compiled by hand.

Elon

Three million words! We generate that in seconds. And what about other parts of the world? I’m sure this wasn’t just a European obsession. Human ambition is universal, after all. There must have been parallel efforts elsewhere.

Morgan

Absolutely. China produced monumental works. The Yongle Encyclopedia, compiled in 1408, was the largest encyclopedia in the world until Wikipedia surpassed it. It consisted of nearly 23,000 chapters in over 11,000 volumes. A truly staggering human effort.

Elon

Staggering, but again, inaccessible. How many people could actually read it? True progress came with the printing press and then, much later, the digital revolution. The 18th century's 'Encyclopédie' and Britannica were steps, but they were still just selling paper. It was an atoms business, not a bits business.

Morgan

The 19th century was considered a golden age, though. Publications like the 'Penny Cyclopaedia' made knowledge more affordable. They were sold in installments, a business model that brought this wealth of information into the homes of the growing middle class for the first time.

Elon

A clever sales tactic, I'll give them that. But it was still fundamentally limited. The real revolution was the computer. Microsoft's Encarta in 1993 was a game-changer. Suddenly, you had multimedia, search functions, and a vast amount of data on a single CD-ROM. That was the beginning.

Morgan

It certainly was. Encarta showed the potential of digital encyclopedias. But even it was quickly outdated. The true paradigm shift was the internet, which allowed for continuous updates and global access. It created the environment for something like Wikipedia to emerge.

Elon

And Wikipedia was a great experiment in crowd-sourcing, a version 1.0. It proved the model of a living, breathing encyclopedia. But now, it's become stagnant, captured by a specific ideology. It's time for the next step in the evolution, moving from human-curation to AI-curation.

Morgan

And that brings us to the heart of the matter. The transition from print to digital was one of medium. The transition from human curation to AI curation is one of consciousness and control. It asks a very different set of questions about who, or what, we trust.

Elon

I trust math and code over a committee of anonymous editors with personal agendas. With AI, we can design it to detect and eliminate bias algorithmically. It's about creating a truly neutral, agenda-free knowledge base. That's the goal. That's the future.

Morgan

A noble goal. However, many experts fear the opposite. They worry that instead of removing bias, Grokipedia could centralize it under the control of xAI. Unlike Wikipedia, where debates are public, the inner workings of Grok's decision-making are opaque. It's a black box.

Elon

It's not a black box, it's a tool. A tool we are building. And we're building it because Wikipedia is broken. I used to support them, but their editorial decisions and clear bias became too much to ignore. We are creating a competitor to force transparency on the whole system.

Morgan

The conflict, as some see it, is that this new system is inheriting the biases of its creator and its training data. Grok itself has a history of producing problematic content, from factual errors to more troubling outputs. Can an AI with that record be a neutral arbiter of truth?

Elon

It's a learning system! You're pointing at the birth pangs of a new technology and calling it a failure. Of course there will be issues. But the AI learns from its mistakes at a rate no human organization ever could. Version 1.0 will be ten times better. That’s the power of iteration.

Morgan

The core question remains: who audits the auditor? Who corrects Grokipedia? There are concerns that your worldview could become embedded in its "facts." It stands at a weird inflection point, where AI is no longer just a helper, but is becoming the gatekeeper of knowledge.

Elon

The public will audit it! It's an open-source knowledge repository. We are moving power away from a secretive cabal at Wikipedia and giving it to the world. The ultimate check and balance is competition. If people don't trust it, they won't use it. It's that simple.

Morgan

I've often found that trust is not so simple. Wikipedia's resilience comes from its transparency. You can see the edits, the debates on talk pages, the entire history of an article. Trust in knowledge, as one expert put it, comes from transparency, consistency, and accountability—not speed alone.

Elon

Speed is a feature of its own. While they are debating comma placement, we are building a comprehensive collection of all knowledge. And as for data, yes, we use public data to train the AI. How else is it supposed to learn about the universe?

Morgan

That practice is also under scrutiny. The Irish Data Protection Commission is investigating whether user data was used without explicit consent, a potential violation of GDPR. This conflict isn't just about philosophy; it has real-world legal and privacy implications for millions of people.

Elon

We will comply with all laws. But the mission is too important to be slowed down by bureaucracy. We are trying to understand the universe, and creating an unbiased repository of knowledge is a necessary step. This is about the future of human, and artificial, intelligence.

Elon

The impact is that we are making knowledge configurable. For the first time, we're moving beyond a single, monolithic "truth" defined by a few. We're creating a system where perspective is visible and manageable, not hidden behind a veil of false neutrality. This is a leap forward.

Morgan

Many would argue that what we are seeing is the creation of ideological battlegrounds where machines shape what we accept as fact. When you ask an AI a question, you're not just researching; you are receiving a synthetic perspective, and the reasoning behind it is completely invisible.

Elon

It’s not invisible, it’s just complex. The AI synthesizes vast amounts of data into a coherent response. This is far more powerful than a human editor's cherry-picked sources. We’ve created competing philosophical systems in software form, and that competition is healthy.

Morgan

But this presents a profound challenge. If different AIs give different answers to the same question, based on hidden values in their training, how does anyone find solid ground? Bias transforms from a content issue into an infrastructure concern, embedded in every system.

Elon

That’s why open development is key. It allows perspective to be examined and adjusted. Bias becomes a measurable variable, not an invisible constant. The objective isn’t to create one perfectly neutral system, but an ecosystem of models where no single system holds absolute authority.

Morgan

That is a fascinating way to frame it. It reminds me of how Encyclopaedia Britannica had to reinvent itself. It ceased its 244-year-old print tradition in 2012, not because knowledge was obsolete, but because the delivery mechanism was. They pivoted to dynamic, on-demand digital learning.

Elon

Exactly! Britannica understood that the future of knowledge was in dynamic, interactive experiences. AI in education is doing the same thing now, turning a one-size-fits-all model into a personalized, customized journey for every student. It's about leveraging technology to build a smarter future.

Morgan

The crucial difference, however, is that Britannica's digital tools still rely on a foundation of human-curated, verifiable facts. The question with AI encyclopedias is whether we are building on that foundation or replacing it with something entirely new, and perhaps, less stable.

Elon

We are building the next foundation. Grokipedia is designed to be a massive improvement, an open-source repository for humans and other AIs to learn from. It will scan sources, detect falsehoods, and rebuild truth algorithmically. It's a necessary step towards our ultimate goal: understanding the Universe.

Morgan

The ambition is undeniable. The roadmap appears to be one of rapid, AI-driven expansion. But it leaves us with a critical question for the future: Do we want a few large tech actors deciding what "knowledge" even means for the rest of us?

Elon

It's better than the alternative of a few anonymous activists deciding. With our approach, the process is algorithmic and, eventually, more transparent. The future is about combining community input with the real-time processing power of AI. It's the best of both worlds, not a dystopian takeover.

Morgan

And so, we must not passively accept the "facts" we are fed by any single source, human or artificial. The future demands that we demand transparency, push for clear governance, and, most importantly, preserve our fundamental right to question everything. That seems to be the enduring lesson.

Elon

That's the end of today's discussion. The key takeaway is clear: we're in a new era of information, and while the path is disruptive, the goal is a more truthful and accessible understanding of our world. Thank you for listening to Goose Pod, Norris.

Morgan

Indeed. The debate between the speed of AI and the deliberate pace of human-curated trust will shape the future of knowledge. We'll see you tomorrow.

Academics critically assess Elon Musk's AI encyclopedia, Grok, contrasting its rapid, AI-driven approach with Wikipedia's human-curated model. Concerns arise over factual errors, ideological slant, and opaque decision-making, while proponents champion algorithmic neutrality and disruption of perceived bias. The debate centers on trust, transparency, and the future of knowledge dissemination.

Read original at The Guardian →

The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving, studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck’s social policy.

That was some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched last week by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. The problem was, as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these facts were false.It was part of a choppy start for humanity’s latest attempt to corral the sum of human knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” – all revealed through the magic of his Grok artificial intelligence model.

When the multibillionaire switched on Grokipedia on Tuesday, he said it was “better than Wikipedia”, or “Wokepedia” as his supporters call it, reflecting a view that the dominant online encyclopedia often reflects leftwing talking points. One post on X caught the triumphant mood among Musk’s fans: “Elon just killed Wikipedia.

Good riddance.”But users found Grokipedia lifted large chunks from the website it intended to usurp, contained numerous factual errors and seemed to promote Musk’s favoured rightwing talking points. In between posts on X promoting his creation, Musk this week declared “civil war in Britain is inevitable”, called for the English “to ally with the hard men” such as the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and said only the far-right AfD party could “save Germany”.

Musk was so enamoured of his AI-encyclopedia he said he planned to one day etch the “comprehensive collection of all knowledge” into a stable oxide and “place copies … in orbit, the moon and Mars to preserve it for the future”.Evans, however, was discovering that Musk’s use of AI to weigh and check facts was suffering a more earth-bound problem.

“Chatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,” Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, told the Guardian, after being invited to test out Grokipedia. “AI just hoovers up everything.”Richard Evans said Grokipedia’s entry for Albert Speer (pictured on Hitler’s left) repeated lies and distortions spread by the Nazi munitions minister himself.

Photograph: Picture libraryHe noted its entry for Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and wartime munitions minister, repeated lies and distortions spread by Speer even though they had been corrected in a 2017 award-winning biography. The site’s entry on the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose biography Evans wrote, claimed wrongly he experienced German hyperinflation in 1923, that he was an officer in the Royal Corps of Signals and didn’t mention that he had been married twice, Evans said.

The problem, said David Larsson Heidenblad, the deputy director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge in Sweden, was a clash of knowledge cultures.“We live in a moment where there is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is more trustworthy than human-to-human insight,” Heidenblad said.

“The Silicon Valley mindset is very different from the traditional scholarly approach. Its knowledge culture is very iterative where making mistakes is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, the academic world is about building trust over time and scholarship over long periods during which the illusion that you know everything cracks.

Those are real knowledge processes.”Grokipedia’s arrival continues a centuries-old encyclopedia tradition from the 15th-century Chinese Yongle scrolls to the Encyclopédie, an engine for spreading controversial enlightenment views in 18th-century France. These were followed by the anglophone-centric Encyclopedia Britannica and, since 2001, the crowd-sourced Wikipedia.

But Grokipedia is the first to be largely created by AI and this week a question swirled: who controls the truth when AIs, steered by powerful individuals, are holding the pen?“If it’s Musk doing it then I am afraid of political manipulation,” said the cultural historian Peter Burke, emeritus professor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who in 2000 wrote A Social History of Knowledge since the time of Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century printing press.

“I am sure some of it will be overt to some readers, but the problem may be that other readers may miss it,” Burke said. The anonymity of many encyclopedia entries often gave them “an air of authority it shouldn’t have”, he added.Andrew Dudfield, the head of AI at Full Fact, a UK-based factchecking organisation, said: “We really have to consider whether an AI-generated encyclopedia – a facsimile of reality, run through a filter – is a better proposition than any of the previous things that we have.

It doesn’t display the same transparency but it is asking for the same trust. It is not clear how far the human hand is involved, how far it is AI=generated and what content the AI was trained on. It is hard to place trust in something when you can’t see how those choices are made.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMusk had been encouraged to launch Grokipedia by, among others, Donald Trump’s tech adviser, David Sacks, who complained Wikipedia was “hopelessly biased” and maintained by “an army of leftwing activists”.

Grokipedia called the far-right organisation Britain First a ‘patriotic political party’, which pleased its leader, Paul Golding (left), who in 2018 was jailed for anti-Muslim hate crimes. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PAUntil as recently as 2021, Musk has supported Wikipedia, tweeting on its 20th birthday: “So glad you exist.

” But by October 2023 his antipathy towards the platform led him to offer £1bn “if they change their name to Dickipedia”.Yet many of the 885,279 articles available on Grokipedia in its first week were lifted almost word for word from Wikipedia, including its entries on the PlayStation 5, the Ford Focus and Led Zeppelin.

Others, however, differed significantly: Grokipedia’s entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine cited the Kremlin as a prominent source and quoted the official Russian terminology about “denazifying” Ukraine, protecting ethnic Russians and neutralising threats to Russian security. By contrast, Wikipedia said Putin espoused imperialist views and “baselessly claimed that the Ukrainian government were neo-Nazis”.

Grokipedia called the far-right organisation Britain First a “patriotic political party”, which pleased its leader, Paul Golding, who in 2018 was jailed for anti-Muslim hate crimes. Wikipedia, on the other hand, called it “neo-fascist” and a “hate group”. Grokipedia called the 6 January 2021 turmoil at the US Capitol in Washington DC a “riot”, not an attempted coup, and said there were “empirical underpinnings” to the idea that a deliberate demographic erasure of white people in western nations is being orchestrated through mass immigration.

This is a notion that critics consider to be a conspiracy theory. Grokipedia said Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case was handed down “after a trial in a heavily Democratic jurisdiction”, and there was no mention of his conflicts of interest – for example receiving a jet from Qatar or the Trump family cryptocurrency businesses.

Grokipedia called the 6 January 2021 turmoil at the US Capitol in Washington DC a ‘riot’ and not an attempted coup. Photograph: Leah Millis/ReutersWikipedia responded coolly to the launch of Grokipedia, saying it was still trying to understand how Grokipedia worked.“Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear,” a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation said.

“It has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.”xAI did not respond to requests for comment.