Just nine months after Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, his anti-woke alternative to Wikipedia, the AI-generated encyclopedia appears to be dead or at least paused for now.
Lawfare reported this week that Grokipedia appears to have stopped reviewing suggested edits and updating its articles since April 24. As far as its researchers could tell, no entry on the site has changed in more than three months.
Although Grokipedia’s articles are written and maintained by xAI’s Grok, the encyclopedia allows human users to suggest corrections. The AI is supposed to review each submission, which then moves through a visible queue from “in review” to “approved” or “rejected” and then “implemented.”
Previously, that process could take only minutes. But Lawfare researchers noticed that some suggestions had been sitting “in review” for more than six weeks.
To test the system, they submitted a straightforward factual update noting that SpaceX had launched its initial public offering in June. Other users had already suggested the same change, but Grokipedia’s SpaceX page still describes the IPO as an upcoming event rather than something that has already happened.
The researchers then checked some of the site’s most popular pages and found the same pattern. Grokipedia’s ChatGPT entry, for example, approved 12 edits on April 24. Every suggestion submitted after is still “in review.”
Lawfare ultimately analyzed 34,519 pages and found that none of them have been updated in the past three months.
The researchers also compared archived versions of roughly 480 pages from before and after April 24. They found no changes, suggesting that Grokipedia’s AI has also stopped updating entries on its own.
Lawfare is not the only one to have noticed.
Someone posted “Is Grokipedia dead?” on Reddit in June, noting that despite submitting more than 2,000 edits to the site, none of their recent suggestions had been accepted.
“Is @Grokipedia dead or abandoned now? I have article creation and suggestions stuck in review for almost two months now…,” wrote an X user in July.
Meanwhile, the last time Musk mentioned Grokipedia was in February.
The apparent freeze comes less than a year after xAI launched Grokipedia last October.
“We are building Grokipedia @xAI,” Musk wrote on X in September of last year. “Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
Musk had previously derided Wikipedia as “Wokipedia” and complained that there was no alternative aligned with more right-wing views.
Grokipedia debuted with roughly 885,000 AI-generated articles. It has since grown to more than 6 million, and its pages have begun appearing as sources in answers generated by other AI models, like ChatGPT.
That makes the site’s apparent abandonment a bigger problem.
“A reference work whose contents are silently frozen and whose editorial record is inaccurate could propagate incorrect or outdated information into answers that people encounter elsewhere,” wrote Lawfare’s Renee DiResta and Ronald Robertson. “There are also potential reputational consequences for individuals with unreliable Grokipedia biographies who can no longer appeal to the AI for an edit.”
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
