Can Elon Musk's Grokipedia Beat Wikipedia? Controversy Erupts on Social Media

Wikipedia has been the internet's top source of information for what seems like forever, but now, a big debate has broken out online about whether Elon Musk's newly launched Grokipedia could actually outmatch the original, famous online encyclopedia. Grokipedia is an AI-made platform made to function as a rival to the human-curated pages like Wikipedia.

Grokipedia, and its launch, has led to both enthusiastic support and big criticism. On social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), users have shared stories of Grokipedia offering surprisingly accurate summaries, while others have talked about big mistakes and ideological slants.

On viral tweet described how Grokipedia initially published an article about an individual's career that was mostly accurate but contained a huge factual error about their personal life. But why the tweet got millions of views and tons of replies is not because of Grokipedia making a mistake, it was because of what happened next.

What Is Grokipedia and How Does It Work

Grokipedia is an online encyclopedia powered by AI, launched in October 2025 by xAI, the AI company founded by Elon Musk. The platform uses the Grok language model to generate, fact check, and update articles in real time.

Unlike Wikipedia, which relies on volunteers around the world to write and edit content, Grokipedia produces its entries automatically, with the AI system putting together information from massive datasets and making it into coherent articles. At launch, Grokipedia featured hundreds of thousands of entries as per reports, and by early 2026, that number had expanded as the system continued to generate and approve content.

Moreover, one of the biggest differences between Grokipedia and Wikipedia is in how content is created and revised. Wikipedia uses a crowdsourced model where human editors collaborate in a transparent process, and discussion pages allow for consensus building on contentious topics. But, Grokipedia does not allow users to directly edit articles. Instead, visitors can submit suggestions via a feedback feature, and the AI evaluates those suggestions before applying changes.

Furthermore, because it is AI made, Grokipedia can produce and update content very fast. It also has disclaimers when material is adapted from sources such as Wikipedia under a Creative Commons licence. However, this reliance on Wikipedia's existing content has obviously been criticised by people who question whether Grokipedia can truly offer something new or independent.

However, despite this 'truth mission' Grokipedia is reportedly on, academics have found early versions of Grokipedia articles to be longer than their Wikipedia counterparts but with fewer explicit references to credible sources and a bigger tendency to favour ideological expansions over citation-based verification.

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Wikipedia vs Grokipedia

The controversy around Grokipedia got hot after a viral post on X by content creator Nuseir Yassin, better known as the founder of Nas Daily. In the tweet, Yassin explained that Grokipedia had automatically generated a 10,000 word article about his career, projects, and public work. According to him, around 95% of the information was accurate, but the article made one important personal error. It said that he had been married and later divorced, something Yassin said had never happened.

But what caught the internet's attention was not the mistake itself, but how Grokipedia handled the correction. Instead of appealing to volunteer editors, as is standard practice on Wikipedia, Yassin said he simply pointed out the incorrect sentence and typed a short clarification stating that he had never been married. Grokipedia then allegedly responded by conducting what he described as an unusually long verification process. The AI reportedly scanned hours of his content and reassessed the claim before approving and publishing the correction almost instantly.

This then led Yassin to call the experience a fundamental change in how online knowledge systems might operate in the future. In his tweet, he argued that this design shows what Elon Musk has repeatedly described as a focus on 'truth', not as a branding exercise but as a functional principle built into the system. The post went on to criticise Google for prioritising Wikipedia in search results. That being said, many users are still unsure of the inherent bias studies have reportedly found within Grokipedia.