AI-Written Encyclopedia: A Revolutionary Idea?

Imagine an online encyclopedia where articles are not edited by humans, but by artificial intelligence (AI). Sounds like science fiction, right? But what if it were possible? I recently had this crazy idea, and I wanted to explore its feasibility. Why would we want an AI-written encyclopedia? Let's dive in.

Firstly, it's possible. If an AI can generate a report on a topic, why not create an entire encyclopedia article on the same subject? The main advantage of an AI-written encyclopedia is that it provides common knowledge, which seems like an endangered species lately. Unlike human-edited encyclopedias, AI-generated content avoids sycophancy and presents facts as they are, without embellishments.

Generating a single article might seem expensive, but it's cheaper than generating individual answers for each person who reads the encyclopedia. As the website gains popularity and hopefully gets funding, it can expand its scope. The number of volunteers would not be a bottleneck, unlike human-edited encyclopedias where volunteers are crucial for maintaining quality.

The first interesting experimental result would be to compare the AI encyclopedia's quality with Wikipedia. I'm not interested in a "computers vs humans" competition; my goal is to understand whether an AI can generate a decent encyclopedia at all. If the result is comparable to Wikipedia, I'll consider it a success.

Enforcing consistent standards on the AI encyclopedia would be relatively easy. By adding rules to the system prompt, we can ensure that AIs follow specific guidelines, such as carefully writing about living people to avoid potential lawsuits.

If this first test succeeds and shows that AIs can write quality articles, there are several ideas to explore further. One possibility is translation to languages other than English, where volunteers are scarce. We could also add sources written in the target language, optimize articles for a specific audience, or even display references to sources in multiple languages.

Another idea would be to allow readers to specify which languages they're comfortable with and display references accordingly. This feature could provide extra value if certain details are not mentioned in English sources but exist in other languages. We can further explore this concept and consider different versions of articles optimized for different audiences.

But what about human feedback? If we don't take this as an experiment, but rather care about the encyclopedia's accuracy, it would be useful to accept human suggestions. However, introducing human editors might complicate things. We could start with a version where humans can only add content and let AIs update the article accordingly.

Ideally, we'd have a collaborative encyclopedia written by both humans and AIs. To combat biases in individual AIs, we could implement some kind of system that allows multiple AIs to disagree with each other and even vote on changes or veto them. This would help readers notice possible AI bias.

Another challenge is dealing with prompt injection and avoiding propaganda. As AI usage becomes more common, so will attempts to hack the systems by including hidden instructions in web pages. We might need to develop best practices for this issue as well.

Finally, there's the problem of pictures. Many articles benefit from having images, but generated text is text, while generated photos are fake. One possible solution would be to import photos from Wikipedia or implement a system for human verification. On the other hand, AIs could generate graphs and diagrams.

This idea might seem crazy, but it's worth exploring. Who knows? Maybe someone will take on this challenge and create an AI-written encyclopedia that surpasses human-edited ones in quality.

Suggestions and Next Steps

So, what do you think? Do you have any suggestions or ideas for this project? Perhaps you'd like to volunteer your time and help make this concept a reality? We'll need to try out different approaches and see what works best. Let's collaborate and push the boundaries of AI-human collaboration in creating high-quality content.