Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales Shrugs Off Elon Musk’s “Cartoon Imitation” Grokopedia as AI Hallucinations Plague Accuracy

In an era where the internet has become increasingly “enshittified,” Wikipedia remains a rare bastion of the web’s original egalitarian promise. Free, meticulously cited, and perpetually self-auditing, the open-source encyclopedia has been hailed as one of the digital world’s few wonders. Sustained by volunteer editors and community donations since 2001, Wikipedia is widely regarded as humanity’s best effort yet to compile the sum of all knowledge.

But as AI companies have discovered, this treasure trove of human-vetted information also makes model training remarkably easier. However, when AI systems trained on Wikipedia began reflecting reality’s well-documented liberal bias—piercing the tech industry’s echo chamber—some powerful figures grew uncomfortable. Enter Elon Musk, who launched Grokopedia last October as an AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia, framing it as a necessary correction to what he and others claim is a “woke mind virus” infecting the platform.

At India’s AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales was asked about the threat posed by Grokopedia and similar projects. His response was characteristically dismissive. “It’s a cartoon imitation of an encyclopedia,” Wales stated, making it clear he sees no real competition.

Wales emphasized that Wikipedia’s strength lies in its human editors—the “obsessives” who bring deep subject-matter expertise and rigorous due diligence to the platform. “Why do I go to Wikipedia? I go to Wikipedia because it’s human-vetted knowledge,” he explained. “We would not consider for a second today letting an AI just write Wikipedia articles because we know how bad they can be.”

The Wikipedia founder’s skepticism about AI-generated content is well-founded. A 2025 OpenAI study revealed that even their most advanced models hallucinate erroneous, misleading, or tangential information at rates as high as 79% in some tests. These hallucinations become even more problematic when AI systems are asked to explore increasingly niche or complex subjects—precisely where human experts excel.

“That sort of full, rich human context of understanding is actually quite important in terms of really understanding both what does the reader want and what does the reader need,” Wales noted. He championed the role of dedicated editors who can provide the nuanced understanding that current AI systems simply cannot match.

While Wales kept his critique focused on the technical limitations of AI-generated content, critics have already uncovered deeper issues with Grokopedia. The platform has been accused of promoting white nationalist narratives and offering what some journalists have called “Elon Musk’s version of the truth”—a far cry from Wikipedia’s commitment to neutrality and verifiable facts.

The larger concern, however, extends beyond the rivalry between these two information platforms. We’re witnessing the creation of distinctly rival versions of reality. As more people turn to Grokopedia for information that confirms their existing beliefs rather than challenges them, the gap between these competing worldviews widens. The more users embrace these alternative information ecosystems, the more difficult it becomes to bridge the divide and return to a shared understanding of facts.

Wikipedia may still be the universally agreed-upon repository of earthly information, but the emergence of Grokopedia represents something more troubling: the deliberate construction of an alternative reality that serves specific ideological interests rather than the pursuit of objective truth.

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