Elon Musk's Grokipedia launches with AI-cloned pages from Wikipedia (www.theverge.com)

xAI’s Grokipedia — a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia tied to Elon Musk’s Grok project — is now live in an early v0.1 form and contains hundreds of thousands of entries. Several pages explicitly state they’re “adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0,” and reporters found some articles (e.g., PlayStation 5, Lincoln Mark VIII) copied almost word-for-word from Wikipedia. The site’s interface mimics Wikipedia (search-focused homepage, headings, citations) but lacks robust community editing: edit controls either aren’t available or only show opaque, already-applied edits without clear provenance. Entries also display “fact-checked” stamps and timestamps — a fraught claim given LLMs’ propensity to hallucinate. Grokipedia currently lists ~885,000 articles versus Wikipedia’s ~7 million English pages. For the AI/ML community this raises three concerns: provenance, licensing, and trust. Relying on Wikipedia content is legal under CC BY-SA if proper attribution and share-alike terms are met, but wholesale copying without transparent attribution/signature of edits undermines credibility and auditability. Content differences on contentious topics (e.g., climate change wording that downplays consensus) highlight editorial bias risks when LLMs repurpose or reinterpret human-curated knowledge. The project underscores the need for clear data provenance, verifiable edit histories, rigorous fact-checking workflows, and transparency about model training and content sourcing before AI-driven encyclopedias can be trusted as neutral references.