How Similar Are Grokipedia and Wikipedia? A Multi-Dimensional Textual and Structural Comparison

The launch of Grokipedia—an AI-generated encyclopedia developed by ElonMusk’s xAI—was presented as a response to perceived ideological and structuralbiases in Wikipedia, aiming to produce “truthful” entries using the Grok largelanguage model. Yet whether an AI-driven alternative can escape the biases andlimitations of human-edited platforms remains unclear. This study conducts a large-scale computational comparison of 17,790 matched article pairs from the 20,000most-edited English Wikipedia pages. Using metrics spanning lexical richness,readability, reference density, structural features, and semantic similarity, we assesshow closely the two platforms align in form and substance. We find that Grokipediaarticles are substantially longer and contain significantly fewer references per word.Moreover, Grokipedia’s content divides into two distinct groups: one that remainssemantically and stylistically aligned with Wikipedia, and another that divergessharply. Among the dissimilar articles, we observe a systematic rightward shiftin the political bias of cited sources, concentrated primarily in entries related topolitics, history, and religion. More broadly, the findings indicate that AI-generatedencyclopedic content departs from established editorial norms, favoring narrativeexpansion over citation-based verification, raising questions about transparency,provenance, and the governance of knowledge in automated information systems.