On February 21, Bloomberg reported that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he was not worried about the threat posed by AI-generated content to Wikipedia, including Elon Musk’s AI encyclopedia Grokipedia, because such information is often error-prone.
Wales
Wikipedia is a well-known Internet encyclopedia whose entries are written and edited by human volunteers.
"Why would I use Wikipedia? Because the knowledge on it has been reviewed by humans. We are not currently considering having AI write Wikipedia entries directly because we know how bad they can be. So I don't think it is a concern," Welsh said.
He pointed out that there are some problems in the content generated by large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Gemini. One of them is that "hallucinations" still occur frequently, that is, wrong or misleading information is generated.
Because of this, he is not worried about challenges from competitors, such as Grokipedia, the online AI encyclopedia launched last year by Musk's xAI. He calls Grokipedia"A parody of an encyclopedia."
Wales said that as the topic becomes more popular or niche, the phenomenon of AI "hallucinations" will become more obvious and common. He points out that the value of human-written entries is that they benefit from contributions from domain experts, which helps prevent inaccurate information and makes articles more informative.
A study conducted by OpenAI in 2025 found that even with its advanced models, hallucinations are still common, with hallucination rates as high as 79% in some tests.
“The less popular the topic, the greater the hallucination problem,” Welsh said. “So in areas where you might think we need AI, it actually does very, very poorly.”