While rivalry between Elon Musk and Sam Altman may be touching an all-time high, it doesn’t seem to be stopping their AI products from collaborating. Musk’s xAI had introduced Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia, to take on Wikipedia last year and now the website has started becoming a source when searching the web via ChatGPT’s latest GPT-5.2 model.
As per a report by The Guardian, GPT-5.2 cited Grokipedia nine times while responding to over a dozen queries. The chatbot took help from xAI’s platform on issues like political structures in Iran, like salaries of the Basij paramilitary force and the ownership of the Mostazafan Foundation, to queries on British historian Sir Richard Evans.
Since its launch last year, Grokipedia has been accused of copying much of the information verbatim from Wikipedia and in areas where it doesn’t, the AI encyclopedia has been accused of propagating right-wing propaganda and Elon Musk’s personal views. The AI encyclopedia has earlier been found to spread lies about the 6 January incident in the US, gay marriage, and climate change.
Unlike Wikipedia where humans can edit any entry directly, Grokipedia uses a centralized AI-backed editing system where users can only suggest corrections through a feedback form but not make the changes themselves.
Although, the report notes that ChatGPT did not cite Grokipedia when asked to repeat the misinformation about the 6 January insurrection or media bias against Donald Trump. Grokipedia’s information is said to infiltrate ChatGPT’s responses on more obscure topics.
For instance, the chatbot repeated stronger claims about the Iranian government’s links to MTN-Irancell than can be found on Wikipedia. It also asserted that the company has links to the office of Iran’s supreme leader.
In another instance, ChatGPT took help from Grokipedia while repeating information about Sir Richard Evans’ work as an expert witness against Holocaust denier David Irving’s trial.
OpenAI not alone in citing Grokipedia:
While OpenAI’s ChatGPT widely cited Grokipedia as the source, the AI startup wasn’t the only one using the responses from Musk’s encyclopedia. Claude AI maker Anthropic also cited Grokipedia when answering queries on issues from petroleum production to Scottish ales.
An OpenAI spokesperson responded to the controversy in a response to The Guardian, stating that the web search feature “aims to draw from a broad range of publicly available sources and viewpoints”.
“We apply safety filters to reduce the risk of surfacing links associated with high-severity harms, and ChatGPT clearly shows which sources informed a response through citations,” they added.
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