Grokipedia: A rush for digital information lands

Elon Musk has introduced Grokipedia, an AI-powered online encyclopedia project launched on October 27, 2025. According to Musk, Wikipedia is "left-biased," and his own encyclopedia will function as a form of ideological control agent (euronews). However, right-wing views, ideological biases, historical distortions, and false claims have been detected in some of Grokipedia's content (wired). Furthermore, it is alleged that much of Grokipedia's content is largely quoted or adapted from Wikipedia.

Looking at the historical process, the internet, which was met with enthusiastic optimism, was a symbol of collective access to information in its early years. The non-profit Wikipedia became a symbol of digital democracy with its principles of volunteer labor, open-source editing, and collective verification. The political economy of information production and ownership has been at the center of the digital economy, especially since the 2000s. While projects like Wikipedia are based on the model of commons-based peer production defined by Yochai Benkler (2002), platforms like Google, Meta, and X have commercialized shared labor (Fuchs, 2017). Nick Srnicek's (2016) conceptualization of "platform capitalism" defined this process as a new form of capital accumulation. However, after the 2020s, this situation was interpreted by Yanis Varoufakis (2024) as "technofeudalism." A new feudal structure was described in which the suspicious view of the internet's unequal network structure became clear, and users were dependent on platforms considered digital lands. Yet, this concept, which has become very popular and attracted much attention, softens the reality that Musk is a pure capitalist. His monopolistic control over the information and attention economy does not encompass the threat to humanity's cognitive capacity in a much more subtle and complicated way. At this point, data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019) and the cognitive authoritarianism of technology platforms are increasing in platform capitalism. For example, as of 2025, models like Wikipedia are being besieged by AI-based closed information platforms. Musk's Grokipedia initiative is the latest example of this. It takes Wikipedia's open-source ethos and traps it within a closed algorithmic system.

The power of Wikipedia, where each entry grows with user contributions and information is produced as a process, comes from the fact that it does not belong to any capital group. Today, Musk's commercial Grokipedia is taking shape within the X ecosystem without attracting the attention of many. Grokipedia is tied to the infrastructure of Musk's company, xAI. In other words, Grokipedia does not produce information; it mines information. Labor, attention, and participation are exploited in digital information production. While the user thinks they are "contributing," they are actually training the AI. And the value of the data goes to the owner of the algorithm rather than the user. In this state, Grokipedia resembles an epistemic mine more than a classic encyclopedia. In this context, Grokipedia is an attempt by Musk to reshape the information regime using the AI, platforms, and media access he owns. Therefore, the close relationship between Grokipedia's "AI fact-check" system and cognitive authoritarianism must be recognized. The claim used by Musk when defining Grokipedia—that propaganda will be cleaned by AI—is an ideological discourse. These discourses are intended to strengthen the perception that Musk's project is neutral, objective, and scientific. This discourse is an attempt to establish a new ideological center under the guise of neutrality. Because today, ideology is produced through interfaces. Algorithms that appear neutral carry an invisible value system. What is visible, what is hidden, what is called "true information"—all are black-box technologies containing a software-based political preference. For truth and reality, we will now have to track down who the code owner is. When Grokipedia's algorithmic theocracy is perceived as a new epistemic religion—as if a divine AI is distributing "truth"—information can turn into a commodity, accuracy into a service, and thinking into a subscription model.

Musk dreams of a new information ecosystem with his strong presence on X and the integrated infrastructure of Grokipedia. The goal is to offer Grokipedia to X users as a fact-checking information source, in addition to queries coming through search engines. Thus, platform dominance and content control will proceed together. The flow of information can be directed to a source directly integrated into algorithmic processes. With this situation, which provides a great advantage in the attention economy, Grokipedia is—in its purest and mildest form—a commercial global information management initiative. Information becomes a commodity here. It generates value depending on the number of users, interaction, and algorithmic visibility. Instead of human editor labor in information production, AI labor provides the opportunity to produce information cheaper and faster; capital accumulation occurs in information production and control.

When we compare the two information sources, Wikipedia has volunteer editors, transparent processes, and discussion pages; each entry is presented with a bibliography, literature, and audit chain. Entries can be audited by the community. The labor-intensive content editing process is arduous. It also has a reputation among academia and users. There is even a Wikipedia Monument in the city of Slubice, Poland, designed by sculptor Mihran Hakobyan. Grokipedia, a product of black-box technology, has no direct editing, while participation and collective audit mechanisms are excluded. Auditing is carried out not by the community, but by an algorithmic system. In some entries, the bibliography is quite weak. Information legitimacy is controversial due to AI-adapted content. With the criticism of "adapted Wikipedia," the claim of neutrality is weak, and the risk of ideological camouflage is high. Fast production is done with AI, but the cost of speed is errors, biases, hallucinations, and missing sources. Musk's goal is to expand his control over the flow of information and to unite his platform network and user base under a single integrated system. If Musk's goal in the platform ecosystem is realized, the control of information sources by "global technology capital" will increase. In short, the Grokipedia-Wikipedia comparison is not an encyclopedia war.

Wikipedia offered an information architecture based on volunteer labor, open to audit, and non-profit. However, Musk's Grokipedia reverses this model, where content contributions will be filtered by AI and the produced content will be integrated into xAI's language model database. In other words, while the user thinks they are contributing to information, they are actually training the AI model and contributing to a capitalized data chain. The situation where volunteer content production is the invisible fuel of platform capitalism with Terranova's (2000) concept of free labor still holds true. Grokipedia turns this free labor into AI training data, making information itself an object of property. While information in Wikipedia is a shared common good produced together, in Grokipedia, information is "platform property." In this new order, user labor is invisible, the production process is masked by gamification, and the property relationship is legitimized under the guise of "AI neutrality." By closing the public sphere, access to information is transformed into a platform-centered private property regime. With this transformation, beyond Zuboff's (2019) surveillance capitalism, information is not just being watched; it is being pre-arranged. Truth is removed from public negotiation and turns into an algorithmic design decision. In terms of new media studies, this design represents a new model for the production, circulation, and ownership of information.

In short, truth cannot be an algorithmic decision hiding behind the myth of neutrality. Although Musk's Grokipedia project sets out with the search for "neutral information," we know that algorithms are not neutral; they are as neutral as whoever wrote them, and they are on their side.

As a result, on one side is the collective mind of Wikipedia; on the other is the algorithmic authority of Grokipedia.

On one side is discussion; on the other is automatic verification.

On one side is "our" information production; on the other is their data ownership.

Today, information becoming a private digital property means

that every platform establishes its own information land.

In these lands, users plant content, but the product belongs to the platform. In Grokipedia's private

garden, it is free for humanity to plant information, but the profit and wealth will remain with the platform.

Just like the common lands enclosed in the early periods of capitalism,

now information is being surrounded by digital fences. The importance of digital information ownership stems from it determining the boundaries of thought. Because users looking for information on Grokipedia, which expects confirmation from Grok, may develop intellectual laziness, and humanity may think within the framework of algorithmic bias and ideology found in pre-coding.

We cannot see Grokipedia as the antithesis of Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia's collective labor is being rewritten in the language of platform capitalism.

Wikipedia taught us that information can grow safely by sharing and solidarity.

Grokipedia, on the other hand, will show how information can be extinguished by privatization. Most likely, we will experience how we can rent out our minds for speed, and that we will be too lazy to even think. AI is intended to be made into a "technological God" that has the final say in the production of truth, and in a scenario where there is no auditing and no regulations, humanity will "bow down" before the information system it created and, therefore, to the platform owners.

Accurate information and the flow of information cannot be under the monopoly of individuals, companies, or an algorithm. For this reason, we must question who should be the owner of truth in the world today.

I have questions again. Will we leave our digital lands to "licensed truth" instead of free information? Grokipedia, which aspires to own the truth, is an algorithm, and why does someone want to encode the truth? How will public information live in the new form of power of global technology companies, in AI-mediated communication and information ecosystems?