Wikipedia:Grokipedia

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

Grokipedia as a source

Per consensus discussions, usage of Grokipedia as a source is deprecated, for breaching Wikipedia's fundamental standards. According to Wikipedia policy, all material on Wikipedia must be verifiable, meaning that anything said on Wikipedia must be based on a reliable source. For multiple reasons, Grokipedia is not and cannot be reliable. First, Grokipedia is generated using a large language model, and Content from LLM tools such as ChatGPT and other AI chatbots is generally unreliable (see WP:RSML). Second, the raw material of Grokipedia includes Wikipedia itself. To quote Wikipedia's policies on verifiability and copyright: Do not use websites mirroring Wikipedia content or publications relying on material from Wikipedia as sources and If you know or reasonably suspect that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of copyright, do not link to that copy of the work.

Although Grokipedia is not technically speaking a mirror of Wikipedia, some Grokipedia articles are word-for-word copies of Wikipedia articles, or include large sections that are word-for-word copies. In such cases Grokipedia will usually include a CC-BY-SA license at the bottom of the page. Failure to include the license is a copyright violation. And even if the license is included, relying on a "source" that is derived from Wikipedia is just using Wikipedia with extra steps.

Grokipedia as an online encyclopedia

Grokipedia asserts itself to be an online encyclopedia, but it is not a wiki. Not being a wiki, it could never have policies, procedures, features, or philosophy similar to that of Wikipedia.

Core principles that Grokipedia does not follow:

Consensus – Grokipedia is not consensus-based or community-oriented. Readers have no choice but to accept the decisions of the site owners.
Transparency – Grokipedia has no public diffs.
Anyone can edit – Grokipedia employs private gatekeepers. If your suggested edit does not meet their approval, it is discarded.
Open knowledge – xAI claims to own the copyright on Grokipedia's content, which is for-profit and not available to reuse.
Editorial model – Grokipedia operates with an opaque, top-down editorial model, rather than a set of transparent, published community standards like Wikipedia.

Policy examples:

WP:NPOV – Grokipedia heavily slants towards the agenda of the richest person in the world: personally, politically, economically, philosophically.^[1] For example, according to The Atlantic, "Musk has repeatedly stated that he wants his AI model to be anti-woke" and according to Musk produce "unhinged NSFW" content.^[2]
WP:NOR (Original Research) – LLMs engage in substantial original research. If there are contradictory sources, or unknown information, LLMs will revert to the mean and infer (guess) a most likely outcome.
WP:V (Verifiability) – LLMs have a hard time connecting facts with sources. They train on large amounts of sources, blend the text into "tokens" of a few characters in length, and reassemble into words, sentences and paragraphs based on the most-statistically-likely outcomes for which tokens come next. This can produce amazing and/or bizarre results. It can also be extremely difficult to track down where an assertion came from. LLMs are notorious for hallucinating fake citations, giving incorrect citations, or not accurately representing what a citation actually says.
WP:RS (Reliable Sources) – Musk frequently attacks "legacy media" such as The Associated Press and The New York Times as being unreliable. He advocates for social media – such as X, the company he owns – to replace "legacy media".^[3] Social media is usually not a reliable source on Wikipedia.