Elon Musk’s Wikipedia clone is not doing a great job of imitating Wikipedia these days.
Grokipedia launched late last year as an AI-written alternative to the popular crowdsourced encyclopedia, which Musk called Wokipedia” on X. Evidently, the AI-generated resource hasn’t been updated since April of this year, according to an investigation published by Lawfare this week. According to Lawfare, not a single entry on Grokipedia has been updated in more than three months, and every user-submitted edit request has been sitting in a dead-end queue since earlier this year.
Lawfare’s reporters said they assumed Grokipedia was simply blocking edits to sensitive pages. So, Lawfare tried submitting an uncontroversial factual edit to the SpaceX page (that the company had gone public recently) and not only did the update never happen, but other visible requests from users for the same exact edit have been sitting in the queue since the company went public on June 12.
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The site’s investigation revealed that neither “popular nor unpopular pages seemed to be updating.” What’s more, Lawfare found that the “same pattern holds across topics and traffic levels,” which points to a broader problem.
This is strange because, as Lawfare pointed out, edits used to happen very quickly on Grokipedia, previously in a matter of minutes in some cases. It doesn’t seem at all like intended behavior for the site to simply stop editing pages for months at a time. That puts it at a distinct disadvantage compared to something like Wikipedia, which is updated daily to reflect current events as needed.
Though, considering Grokipedia has a history of copying directly from Wikipedia or sourcing white supremacist websites, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
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Topics
Artificial Intelligence
Elon Musk
