Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has expressed skepticism toward Elon Musk’s recently launched Grokipedia project and the use of artificial intelligence in encyclopedias.
Wales admitted that he has not personally reviewed Grokipedia yet, but based on user feedback, he noted that the new platform is filled with self-praising content about Musk. He also expressed doubt that Musk will deliver a serious project at this stage.
Wales’ main concern lies in the reliability of AI. He believes that large language models still make numerous errors and are not yet capable of producing articles at the quality level of Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia founder also warned that AI could exacerbate disinformation problems, highlighting the risk of neural networks generating fake websites with convincing-looking text. While the Wikipedia community is trained to verify facts and is difficult to mislead, Wales emphasized that millions of other users could easily be deceived.
However, Wales does not oppose AI entirely. He noted that AI can be a useful tool—for example, assisting in finding sources for Wikipedia articles or gathering additional information from those sources.
It is worth noting that Elon Musk presented Grokipedia as a competitor to Wikipedia. The platform resembles Wikipedia in appearance and, in some cases, has been observed to directly incorporate content from it.
