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Is Grokipedia Right-Leaning? Comparing Political Framing in Wikipedia and Grokipedia on Controversial Topics

Philipp Eibl, Erica Coppolillo, Simone Mungari, Luca Luceri

TL;DR

Is Grokipedia Right-Leaning? compares Wikipedia and Grokipedia on six controversial topics to assess ideological framing in AI-generated knowledge. It employs section-level embeddings with GPT-5, a RoBERTa-based political-leaning classifier, and ranking metrics to analyze semantic similarity, orientation, and content prioritization. The results show a decaying semantic similarity across article sections, with Grokipedia displaying a more bimodal and slightly more right-leaning orientation than Wikipedia, though both platforms skew left overall. The findings inform discussions on epistemic reliability, search and AI-assisted information, and how AI-generated knowledge may influence public discourse.

Abstract

Online encyclopedias are central to contemporary information infrastructures and have become focal points of debates over ideological bias. Wikipedia, in particular, has long been accused of left-leaning bias, while Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia launched by xAI, has been framed as a right-leaning alternative. This paper presents a comparative analysis of Wikipedia and Grokipedia on well-established politically contested topics. Specifically, we examine differences in semantic framing, political orientation, and content prioritization. We find that semantic similarity between the two platforms decays across article sections and diverges more strongly on controversial topics than on randomly sampled ones. Additionally, we show that both encyclopedias predominantly exhibit left-leaning framings, although Grokipedia exhibits a more bimodal distribution with increased prominence of right-leaning content. The experimental code is publicly available.

Is Grokipedia Right-Leaning? Comparing Political Framing in Wikipedia and Grokipedia on Controversial Topics

TL;DR

Is Grokipedia Right-Leaning? compares Wikipedia and Grokipedia on six controversial topics to assess ideological framing in AI-generated knowledge. It employs section-level embeddings with GPT-5, a RoBERTa-based political-leaning classifier, and ranking metrics to analyze semantic similarity, orientation, and content prioritization. The results show a decaying semantic similarity across article sections, with Grokipedia displaying a more bimodal and slightly more right-leaning orientation than Wikipedia, though both platforms skew left overall. The findings inform discussions on epistemic reliability, search and AI-assisted information, and how AI-generated knowledge may influence public discourse.

Abstract

Online encyclopedias are central to contemporary information infrastructures and have become focal points of debates over ideological bias. Wikipedia, in particular, has long been accused of left-leaning bias, while Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia launched by xAI, has been framed as a right-leaning alternative. This paper presents a comparative analysis of Wikipedia and Grokipedia on well-established politically contested topics. Specifically, we examine differences in semantic framing, political orientation, and content prioritization. We find that semantic similarity between the two platforms decays across article sections and diverges more strongly on controversial topics than on randomly sampled ones. Additionally, we show that both encyclopedias predominantly exhibit left-leaning framings, although Grokipedia exhibits a more bimodal distribution with increased prominence of right-leaning content. The experimental code is publicly available.
Paper Structure (11 sections, 5 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 11 sections, 5 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Methodology
  4. Controversial Topics.
  5. Data.
  6. Results
  7. Semantic Similarity.
  8. Political Leaning.
  9. Conclusions
  10. Limitations.
  11. Future Work.

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: Section-level cosine similarity between Grokipedia and Wikipedia on controversial topics.
  • Figure 2: Average section-level cosine similarity between Grokipedia and Wikipedia for controversial pages compared to a random sample of 100 pages.
  • Figure 3: Political leaning on Grokipedia and Wikipedia across the considered controversial articles. Averages and $95\%$ confidence intervals are visualized.
  • Figure 4: Distribution of political leaning of controversial pages in (a) Wikipedia and (b) Grokipedia.
  • Figure 5: nDCG computed for (a) left- and (b) right-leaning content on Grokipedia and Wikipedia among controversial topics.