Authority in the age of AI:A trajectory of shifting perceptions on encyclopedic value and transformation

Latest technological advancements in natural language processing, have taken the world by storm, popularising ideas of semantic networks developed more than half a century ago. ‘Writing machines’, like Open AI’s ChaptGPT and Google’s Knowledge Graphs, are trained on large generative language models (LLMs) to scrape open from datasets including those Wikipedia and Wikidata to automatically orchestrate prompts and offer responses in the form of meaningful, or factual, statements. Whilst innovation value in earlier phases of knowledge industries was bounded to the power of the networked user, the value of reuse of encyclopedic content, in its hybrid trustworthiness, has come to represent yet another instance, of what Iliadis calls the increasing semantisation of digital domains (Iliadis, 2023: 15). Semanticization, constrained by algorithms' capacity to interpret or recontextualize the implicit biases of encyclopedic content, leads, in turn, to a gradual, synthetic encyclopedization of textual digital domains - making content appear to being encyclopaedic. This paper contends that such trends raise critical questions regarding the value and authority of encyclopedias, as semantic and pedagogic media, or indeed as infrastructural authorities that the AI industry and platforms have come to commodify. <br/><br/>The interplay among encyclopedias, “machine learning” and "writing machines" have compelled researchers to reconsider our interaction with artificial and collective intelligence, including symbolic and logical approaches to knowledge representation as well as the algorithmic deduction of meaning. Crucially, this interplay, also conditioned by the ways in which encyclopedias approach automation, is reshaping public perceptions about encylopedias’ role in the future of knowledge production (Jon Gertner, 2023). <br/><br/>Encyclopaedias have historically been objects of review in the mainstream press, and particularly Wikipedia, have been centre of public discourse surrounding transformations in digital culture, reflecting, to an extent, shifting perceptions about the value and utility of information, but also changing norms and perceptions about authority and legitimacy, quality and relevance (Benjakob and Harrison, 2020; Messner and DiStaso, 2013). Drawing from diverse perspectives ranging chronologies and sociologies of knowledge (Burke, 2012; Leitch, 2014), to critical technology studies (Ford and Iliadis, 2023; Marres, 2015; Mejias, 2013) this paper aims to contextualise the genealogy of such perceptions and their implications for broader digital cultural phenomena. It does so by deploying a discursive analytic approach to topic modelling (Jacobs and Tschötschel, 2019; Jaworska and Nanda, 2016; Törnberg and Törnberg, 2016) of a large corpus of debates sourced from large two decades of UK-US press materials (2002-2022). Demonstrating how the ‘encyclopaedia’ and its longer history as an informational &amp; educational genre reveals a strong relationship between assumptions about the value of knowledge in relation to (digital) media ecologies (Author, forthcoming monograph). The ‘encyclopaedia’ as an ‘interfacial’ metaphor, orientational and semantic medium, is the par excellence case of the advancement of integral, and often troubled, relationships between mediation technologies and mediation histories, shaping the materiality and culture of datafication. <br/><br/>The paper offers insights delineating a periodization that has framed the intersections of encyclopedic authority with economic, cultural and epistemic value