Fakipedia
About
Fakipedia is an AI-generated non-encyclopedia. Users can ask for an article on any topic, real or otherwise, and an article will be generated on the fly.
Concepts
Form as authority. People use all kinds of signals to assess whether they should trust a piece of content or not. Structure, format, and form all play into it. An encyclopedic writing style, wiki-styled page, and implicit UI promises all contribute to the sense of Fakipedia’s authority. To counter that, the app takes every opportunity to remind you of its own unseriousness.
Links as an exploration web. The “Wikipedia rabbit hole” is a natural medium for exploration. In a generated experience, internal links become an alternative to prompting.
A tool for epistemic growth. Fakipedia is most interesting when it technically “fails.” It can produce content that’s inaccurate, but picks up bits and pieces of the right vibes. It can generate fully fictional content with a tone and context that feels authoritative. It will generate articles at the margins of its knowledge that contradict each other. Experiencing any of these situations is an expression of how LLMs encode information, and playing with the app helps grow intuition about how this behavior can play out in more serious LLM usage.