The Encyclopedia of AI

From Library 2.0

Steve Hargadon

I’ve launched The Encyclopedia of AI, an experimental free public reference site for exploring artificial intelligence. It’s designed for students, educators, librarians, and general readers who want an organized starting point, with topic clusters, search, and links to authoritative sources. I built it over the weekend because I couldn't find what I wanted in another site.

There are currently 377 articles spanning 20 topic clusters--from the history of the field and the core technical concepts, to AI in education, libraries, healthcare, government, copyright, the environment, the cognitive effects of relying on these tools, the safety and alignment debates, and the cultural and economic questions everyone is now arguing about. Every article is written in plain language and is intended as an orientation, not a citable authority.
 
The articles are written by AI. Specifically, by Google's Gemini model, working from structured editorial scopes I wrote for each topic. Every article carries a clearly labeled disclaimer at the top, making this explicit. The site is not a substitute for the primary literature; it is an encyclopedia-style entry point into the literature. Each article has a curated list of authoritative sources: peer-reviewed papers, government reports, primary documents, and the best journalistic accounts for readers who want to go deeper. Those source lists are where the real reference work happens.
 
Every article has a private "suggest an improvement" link and a five-star usefulness rating. Reader feedback is never shown publicly (it goes only to me), but it feeds directly into when and how an article gets regenerated at greater depth or with corrected emphasis. This is the part of the experiment I am most curious about: whether a reference work that openly admits its AI origins, and that invites the kind of patient correction librarians and educators are uniquely good at, ends up trustworthy over time.
 
A few things I think this audience might find particularly useful:
  • The AI and Libraries hub gathers entries on the questions library workers are actually being asked right now: collection-level use of AI, reference-desk implications, intellectual freedom and AI-generated content, library catalog enrichment, patron privacy in the age of model-mediated search, and so on.
  • The AI and Education hub covers the corresponding territory for K-12 and higher ed: AI literacy, plagiarism and assessment in the LLM era, tutoring systems, the deskilling debates, accessibility uses, and the tensions inside teacher preparation.
  • The Cognitive and Psychological Effects of AI cluster (cognitive offloading, automation bias, transactive memory, skill regression, and so on) is the one I would point a thoughtful colleague to first if they asked, "What should I be reading about what these tools do to us, not what we do with them?"
  • The Featured Debates on the front page rotate through the contested questions: copyright, the environment, education, and military use; and try to present the major positions fairly rather than picking a side.
  • A simple search is available across the whole site, and every article shows the related entries and curated sources alongside the body text.
The site lives at encyclopediaofai.com.
 
Best,
 
Steve

Steve Hargadon
Library 2.0
admin@library20.com

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