Information literacy in the age of generative tools: Development and validation of the AI Information Literacy Scale (AILIS)

AI information literacy describes people's information practices, namely how they seek, create, process, and evaluate information with GenAI tools across life contexts. This paper presents the development and validation of the AI Information Literacy Scale (AILIS), a self-report measure that explicitly grounds AI literacy in information behavior traditions and spans the information lifecycle. An initial 43 item pool across six conceptual dimensions was refined through expert review to 40 items and five dimensions, then reduced by principal components analysis to a four factor, 39 item scale, administered to 758 adults in Israel. The three broad factors (creation and processing, assessment and critique, seeking and retrieval) showed excellent internal consistency (α = .92-.96), and the two item ethics factor showed acceptable reliability (α = .73). Participants reported moderate AI information literacy, with higher scores among younger and more educated respondents and among those who used AI tools more frequently. AILIS offers a cross contextual measure that links AI literacy to concrete information practices and supports research and organizational diagnosis in educational and information intensive work contexts.