Truth is not a product.
I spend a lot of my time online, maybe more than most. From my wheelchair here in Rimini, the world comes to me through screens and the steady hum of my computer. So when someone like Elon Musk announces he’s going to “massively improve” Wikipedia with his own AI, called Grokipedia, I pay attention. But this doesn't feel like an improvement. It feels heavy.
This whole situation is tangled up in some complex ideas about AI and information. I’m going to try to break it down simply so we all understand what's at stake.
The Illusion of a Better Encyclopedia
First, let's be clear: this isn't about building a better, more accurate encyclopedia. This is a power grab, plain and simple. Wikipedia is messy, I get it. It’s built by a global community of volunteers, a chaotic and beautiful symphony of human collaboration. It's a system based on discussion, verification, and citing sources .
Musk’s plan is to replace that collaborative effort with a single, proprietary AI system. Think about that. Instead of a library built by thousands of people, we’re being offered a single book written by one author who claims it contains the entire universe. It swaps a socially shared process for a top-down, corporate-controlled oracle. In this vision, the future of knowledge isn't something we build together; it's something delivered to us.
The Problem with a Rogue AI
Musk's allies have criticized Wikipedia for having a "left-wing" bias and for having editorial controls they call a "huge problem" . These controls—which AI developers call "guardrails"—are basically filters designed to stop an AI from spitting out the worst things it learns from the internet, like hate speech or dangerous misinformation . An AI model learns from the data it’s fed, and the internet is, to put it mildly, a dumpster fire of raw, unfiltered human expression.
Removing those guardrails isn't a move toward neutrality. It's a choice to let the machine run wild, guided only by the ideology of its creator. What we're being offered is a digital sophist, a clever debater in the hands of one man, programmed to confirm a specific worldview . This isn’t a path to truth; it’s a direct route to weaponized ideology, where what is "true" is simply what the machine—and its owner—decides.
Burning Books in the 21st Century
This brings me to the most chilling part. The writer Jorge Luis Borges once wrote about the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi, who famously built the Great Wall and burned all the books written before his time . Both acts, Borges noted, were about creating a new order by erasing the past .
Musk’s impulse feels terrifyingly similar. He isn't just trying to compete with Wikipedia; his rhetoric suggests he wants to replace it, to declare it obsolete and irrelevant . This is a digital book-burning. It's an attempt to wipe the slate clean and restart the clock on human knowledge from a point zero of his own making . Like the Taliban destroying ancient statues, this move seeks to create a void where a new, unquestionable ideology can take root .
A Story as Old as Power
This desire to control knowledge isn't new. History is littered with encyclopedias designed to serve power. The Encyclopædia Britannica was an emblem of the British Empire's intellectual reach, and the Soviet Union had its own massive encyclopedia to frame the world through a Cold War lens . Italy's own Treccani encyclopedia was born under fascism as a monument to a nationalistic vision of knowledge .
In each case, the encyclopedia was a tool, a way to stamp a particular authority onto the world . But Musk's project is different. It's not just a collection of knowledge that serves power; the AI is the power . It doesn't just present a worldview; it generates reality on demand, without mediation, without debate, and without doubt .
It transforms knowledge from a public process of discussion into a private, faith-based experience . Grokipedia doesn't ask you to learn; it asks you to believe .
That’s why defending the messy, imperfect, and human project of Wikipedia matters so much. We’re not just defending a website. We're defending the very idea that truth is something we find together, through disagreement and debate. An encyclopedia with only one voice doesn't illuminate the world. It erases it .
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