Bernadette Meehan’s page on Grokipedia, Elon Musk’s AI-generated encyclopedia, makes a surprising claim about the Wikimedia Foundation CEO’s formative posting in Brazil—a country she’s never lived in and has only visited. Meehan believes such a mistake wouldn’t last long on Wikipedia—overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation—where some 250,000 editors make roughly 324 edits a minute, almost every tweak entirely traceable. In the age of unattributed AI slop, the crowdsourced encyclopedia founded in 2001 has seldom been more trusted.
At the same time, it risks invisibility, as large language models scrape its entries and divert its readers. When it was launched, many posts on Grokipedia appeared very similar to their Wikipedia counterparts. Speaking on a podcast in October, Musk said that his team had prompted a version of AI model Grok that was trained to be good at “critical thinking” to “cycle through the million most popular articles on Wikipedia and add, modify and delete” based on other publicly available information.
Some articles on Grokipedia previously included a disclaimer saying the content had been adapted from Wikipedia. (SpaceXAI did not respond to a request for comment.) So the nonprofit has taken protective positions. In March, English-language Wikipedia’s volunteer editors elected to bar AI-generated article content, while allowing limited uses in editing—a distinction Meehan acknowledges remains contentious. Since 2021, Wikimedia has had a commercial model for high-volume organizations, but only some AI companies have embraced it.
The nonprofit recently began limiting large-scale reusers of its public APIs, and made one of its reasons clear: an increase in crawlers extracting Wikipedia’s content to train AI. These delicate acts of diplomacy are familiar territory for the former U.S. ambassador to Chile, a veteran negotiator and adviser on national security. Increasingly, Meehan is using her Washington know-how to advocate for Wikipedia, pushing back on allegations of left-wing bias and arguing that the nonprofit should have as much say as the tech giants it is regulated alongside.
Meehan says: “I firmly believe that it would fundamentally be bad for humanity if this project didn’t survive and thrive.”
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