Is Grokipedia Right-Leaning? Comparing Political Framing in Wikipedia and Grokipedia on Controversial Topics
This addresses concerns about ideological bias in online encyclopedias for users and researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing debates.
This paper compared political framing in Wikipedia and Grokipedia on controversial topics, finding that semantic similarity decays across sections and diverges more on controversial topics, with both encyclopedias predominantly left-leaning but Grokipedia showing increased right-leaning content.
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.