Elon Musk’s replacement for Wikipedia is here. On Monday, Musk revealed that his online encyclopedia, Grokipedia, is now operational. Musk mentioned that the present version of Grokipedia is merely “version 0.1” but asserted it’s already “superior to Wikipedia.”

Up until a few years back, Elon Musk often posted links to Wikipedia entries on X, previously known as Twitter. However, after shifting towards extreme right politics, Musk has criticized Wikipedia, alleging it has a leftist bias. He has lately referred to the platform as “Wokipedia” and has called to “defund” or cease support for Wikimedia, the nonprofit managing the site.

In spite of proclaiming its superiority over Wikipedia, Musk’s Grokipedia seems to replicate a large portion of its content. For example, as noted by The Verge, the Grokipedia entry for the Sony video game console PlayStation 5 is a complete verbatim duplication of the Wikipedia entry for PlayStation 5. Grokipedia even replicated the identical table of contents and referenced external sources, although the sequence is changed.

Grokipedia included a disclaimer at the bottom of its PlayStation 5 entry, acknowledging it “adapted” the material from Wikipedia. “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License,” it states. Since Wikipedia content is under a Creative Commons public license, Grokipedia is permitted to republish it under specific conditions.

The duplication concern appears to be widespread. Using Copyscape, we examined the Grokipedia entry for the Titanic, discovering that 18 percent of the content, or roughly 3,600 words, were taken from Wikipedia. Grokipedia’s entry features a note: “Fact-checked by Grok yesterday.”

This implies Grokipedia is more of a fact-verification tool than a true alternative to Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, which depends on volunteer human editors, Musk’s Grok AI is accountable for Grokipedia’s content, frequently scraping Wikipedia entries in their entirety and posting them on Grokipedia.

Social media users keep discovering many Grokipedia entries directly copied from Wikipedia, often unchanged. The Grokipedia entry for composer Franz Liszt? Plagiarized from Wikipedia. The entry for the Miller Effect? Copied sentence-for-sentence from Wikipedia. Grokipedia’s page for the PC-98? Taken from Wikipedia.

One Wikipedia contributor found their own contribution copied word-for-word and published on Grokipedia.

How does Grokipedia contrast with the allegedly woke Wikipedia? Some politically sensitive articles on Grokipedia seem to be rewritten with a rightward slant, but a substantial fraction of Musk’s Wikipedia substitute appears to be Wikipedia in its entirety.