Posted on October 30, 2025
  
Posted by John Scalzi   
 

What? You didn’t know that Grokipedia exists? Well, it does, and it’s Elon Musk’s attempt to run Wikipedia out of town on a rail: An “AI”-generated compendium of information about things and stuff, that also, not coincidentally, aligns with Musk’s weird techno-fascistic view of the world, because he’s got his hand on the tiller with Grok, especially when his pet large language model plunges deep within itself to find an actual fact.

I have personally found a good way to spot-check “AI” is to ask it questions about me and see what it gets wrong, and so, in a similar fashion, I popped over to Grokipedia to see what its article about me says, and how accurate it might be.

And how accurate is it? As accurate as anything made with an LLM, which is to say: meh, not especially, because fundamentally LLMs aren’t built for accuracy, they’re built for statistical probability, and these really are two separate things. Grok can find out things about me on the Internet, and put those things into Grokipedia, but it doesn’t appear to have the ability to discriminate between what is truth and what’s not. If it shows up enough on the Internet, Grok’s happy to print the not truth.

Two small examples of this: Grokipedia incorrectly lists my birth order in relationship to my siblings; it decided to choose between three options and got it wrong. Likewise, Grokipedia confidently asserts, across more than one article, I will note, that Steven Spielberg is involved with the film adaptation of Old Man’s War. The Spielberg thing isn’t true, but it was a rumor that did the rounds on the Internet, because Spielberg is Spielberg, and because OMW is one of the most successful science fiction series that is still (alas!) unproduced as a film. I have repeatedly said Spielberg isn’t making the movie, but me saying that is outnumbered by the number of sites asserting it, so if you’re Grok and you’re basically a statistical engine, who are you going to believe: The one guy who wrote the thing, or the dozens of web sites that cut and pasted the rumor?

(To be clear, it’s not just Grok that gets this wrong, because the architecture of all LLMs is similar. I just asked Gemini and Copilot “Can you tell me if Steven Spielberg is involved in a film version of Old Man’s War” and got affirmatives of varying strengths. Gemini confirmed there are rumors but cautioned that the project is listed as “in development,” whereas Copilot not only straight-up confirmed that Spielberg is officially attached to direct, it even offered up a release date: May 15, 2026. Which means Spielberg has seven months to produce a screenplay, cast the thing, ramp up pre-production, film it, jam in all the post-production and squeeze a score out of John Williams. This on top of the actual movie he has due out in June 2026! So, good luck to him there.)

There are other errors of fact and inconsistencies within Grokipedia; for example, listing one of my books as my first published, and then a few paragraphs later casually mentioning another one of my books which in fact is the first published. Other books of mine are offered with incorrect titles. The article is fairly long and reads as if it was rather sloppily-edited, which isn’t true: It wasn’t edited at all, or, at least not by a human. It’s fair to say Grok’s inherent editing qualities are similar to its information-retrieval-and-assessment qualities, which is to say, not great.

Now, here’s the thing: I am me, and thus, am the definitive expert on me, and I am here to tell you that if you were to rely on the Grokipedia article about me for reference, you would get several things wrong, some things trivial and some others rather less so. If Grokipedia is getting things about me wrong, what else is it getting wrong in other articles, where I do not have the same level of domain knowledge? I can’t trust it to be accurate about me, so how can I trust it to be accurate about any other thing? The answer is, I can’t. Again, it’s put together by an LLM, and LLMs, by their nature, get things wrong.

(As a contrast, incidentally, the current Wikipedia article on me is accurate, put together as it is by actual humans and occasionally updated by them as well. No mention of Spielberg there.)

Aside from the factually-iffy nature of Grokipedia, evidence of Musk’s political and social positions are very clearly baked into the site, or at least, into the article about me. The article spends more than a thousand words detailing my political positions, my involvement in the “Sad/Rabid Puppy” Hugo-related nonsense of a decade past, and, generally, Why Conservatives Don’t Like Me. The last two of these is mostly rehashing how both author Larry Correia and multi-hyphenate grifter Vox Day had bugs up their respective butts about me for a bit. I’m pretty sure Correia hasn’t given me much thought in several years, and honestly who knows what hole Day has fallen down recently, so in general I’m not sure why so much of the Grokipedia piece is given over this sort of thing, other than because this is where Musk’s own biases are, and what’s important to the boss is going to be important to Grok.

I will note that Wikipedia, which Musk has recently spent time castigating as “woke,” because of course he has, that’s his shtick now, has almost no mention of any of this; my political positions are limited to a couple of sentences in the “personal life” section, and the Sad Puppies nonsense, and my tangential-other-than-being-an-approved-whipping-boy role in it, is appropriately put into its own article. Its prominence in my Grokipedia article mostly feels like an attempt for a conservative-leaning site to reframe and relitigate this stuff, which, you know, meh. Any suggestion that Grokipedia is more interested in straight-ahead dissemination of factual information rather than the presentation of certain political viewpoints and perspectives, and certainly in comparison to Wikipedia, is belied in what information it chooses to present and how.

Which, again, is an issue: If this very evident bias is a thing for a subject I intimately know about, i.e., me, how much of an issue is it for the things where I do not have substantive domain knowledge? Having used Wikipedia for a while now, I feel reasonably sure that its biases are not “liberal,” they’re “pedantic,” as in, the sort of person who spends a lot of time creating/editing Wikipedia articles is less interested in shoving a political viewpoint into the articles there than they are in demanding every little fact presented has verifiable third party support. Musk wants to castigate Wikipedia because he is launching a competing product and because, as Stephen Colbert once memorably put it, “facts have a liberal bias,” meaning that they often don’t fit into the (current) conservative viewpoint. Also, Musk is an asshole, which is not to be discounted here.

Which is to say, if you have to choose a “pedia” to trust, you might choose the one assembled by a bunch of pedantic nerds saying “well, ACTUALLY” to each other until the heat death of the universe, over the one assembled by an LLM controlled by an insecure Nazi salute-throwing billionaire who sprints to reprogram that LLM every time it shares a fact that makes that billionaire angry or sad, or doesn’t fit into his Playskool Machiavellian ambitions and plans. In this particular case, a thousand pedantic nerds is much better than a single rich one.

Anyway, hi, I’m John Scalzi, and the Grokipedia article about me is not great. If you like, you can use that as an anecdotal bellwether for the overall veracity and utility of that site in general. We’ll see if it gets better over time. But in the meantime I’m going to consider it at this point like most things that route through Elon Musk: Fashy, unreliable, and generally to be avoided.

— JS

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