Hiyah Zaidi
Published November 26, 2025 12:11pm
Updated November 26, 2025 12:11pm
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Grokipedia is one of Elon Musk’s long list of creations and this one acts as an online encyclopedia to rival the others out there. But according to new research, it has cited the neo-Nazi website Stormfront as a source 42 times. The research also reveals that it relies on other websites that experts have said are unreliable or hate-filled. So, what is going on? (Picture: Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images)
Musk launched Grokipedia as a competitor to what he called the ‘woke’ Wikipedia, after he came under fire for his two straight-armed gestures - likened to the Sieg Heil salute associated with Adolf Hitler - earlier this year. (Picture: Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
But it seems like his new toy is not helping his cause, as the researchers also found the site cites the conspiracy theory website Infowars as a source 34 times and the white nationalist website VDare 107 times. (Picture: ALAIN JOCARD/AFP via Getty Images)
Although the researchers note that these citations only make up a small percentage of Grokipedia’s overall sourcing, they are notable because Wikipedia, by contrast, does not treat those sources as credible. (Picture: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The researchers say that Wikipedia generally does not allow contributors to use them as references – even as primary sources of information about racist ideas or conspiracy theories. (Picture: Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Speaking to NBC News, Harold Triedman, one of the paper’s co-authors said: ‘The guardrails are off. The publicly determined, community-oriented rules that try to maintain Wikipedia as a comprehensive, reliable, human-generated source are not in application on Grokipedia.' (Picture: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Mr Triedman is a former senior privacy engineer for the Wikimedia Foundation and still does part-time contract work for one of its affiliates, however he disclosed in the paper but he said he did the work independently. In total, the researchers found that Grokipedia includes 12,522 citations to online sources which previous researchers have deemed as low credibility. (Picture: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The way it works is that Mr Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, controls whether or not a certain edit is approved and implemented on the website. The process itself is not very transparent, but the company has suggested that Grok, an artificial intelligence chatbot, plays a part in reviewing edit submissions. (Picture: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The paper says that in an article about a Virginia-based white nationalist publication, Grokipedia cites and links to Stormfront seven times, with the links appearing at the bottom of the article under ‘references.’ (Picture: Algi Febri Sugita/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The Grokipidia page also uses phrases such as ‘advancement of peoples of European descent’ in place of labels such as ‘white nationalist’ which is used by Wikipedia editors - while the Grokipedia version is about 15 times longer than the Wikipedia article. (Picture: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
It should be noted that the research is a preprint, meaning the paper has not been vetted by other academic researchers. However, the authors have published their data and methods online. This paper is the first comprehensive attempt to comb through Grokipedia’s more than 880,000 articles. When Metro attempted to contact XAI for a comment, an automated response replied with ‘Legacy Media Lies’. (Picture: Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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