Background

IL was originally conceptualized by Paul Zurkowski in 1974 as development needed to maintain and bolster a competitive, increasingly information-driven workforce. This idea was soon adopted by the education sector, leading to a variety of student-facing programs intended to support engagement with academic information and the use of emerging information technologies. With varying success, IL has more recently been called upon to confront various information disorders–an growing list of challenges directly impacting the use of information, such as continued appearance of mis- and disinformation that may influence politics, healthcare, and so forth. 

Dubbed the “post-truth” era, this period of information disorder is defined by several novel and disruptive notions around using information, including, as Lane Alan Wilkinson describes, that the truthfulness of information is no longer a central concern and is often subjugated by appeals to emotional needs and alignment with personal beliefs. Approaches to IL shifted in this period to focus on fact checking or mis/disinformation detection, producing new evaluation frameworks and layered IL models that shaped IL scholarship and education. 

Scholars such Wayne Bivens-Tatum advocate for IL to more overtly address the philosophical and foundational matters around truth and focus IL efforts on epistemological development arguing this has largely been avoided. While this growing area of IL scholarship is valuable in better understanding and responding to our AI age as it overtly contends with matters around how people make knowledge from the information they interact with, IL responses to the post-truth era have not attended to an even more underlying concern–the relationship between AI-generated information and our sense of reality.

Engaging with AI-Generated Information 

Scholars have explored ideas related to how information informs our sense of reality. In a number of works, including The 4th revolution: How the inforsphere is reshaping human reality, Luciano Floridi explored his idea of the ‘onlife’ where our identities are formed by our online experiences. Albert Borgmann recognized three ways that information helps to shape reality: 1) ‘information about reality’ in which information explains what exists in the world, 2) ‘information for reality’ where information, such as recipes, musical scores, and so forth, enable us to bring new things into reality, and, extremely prescient in today’s world, 3) ‘information as reality’ in which information itself represents a form of reality. An emerging question pertains to how the information people engage with through AI is shifting our sense of reality. Identifying how AI-generated information informs our understanding of the world around us and if this is different from previous periods in time where humans were overwhelmingly the creators of information will allow us to develop more responsive approaches to IL that aim to uncover/better understand deeply rooted conceptions of how our information and sense of reality relate to one another.

Implications for IL 

The omnipresence and opacity of AI in our current information environment should make us question if the period we find ourselves in is still foremost concerned with those same information challenges of the post-truth era that have preoccupied IL researchers and educators. While the value of truth and the affective dimensions of information certainly remain relevant to IL today, something more foundational about the relationship between information and people’s sense of reality (i.e. that information reflects, creates, or becomes reality) warrants scholarly attention. 

Future IL research may reveal that we are in an era where information is far less tied to an objective sense of reality than in previous periods. While scholars such as Jan Söffner have explored changing understandings of reality based on technological change in response to virtual reality and augmented reality, AI presents a new, massively disruptive phenomenon. As the work of creating information shifts from humans to AI and people encounter ever more AI-generated information, it is essential to explore the relationship between how people view information and reality.  Doing so will enable the development of new IL models that make individuals aware of how AI-generated information may influence their sense of reality and empower them to act choicefully. 

Conclusion

The liminal space shaped by the significant challenges representative of the post-truth era is changing in response to new, undefined challenges presented by AI. Uniquely different from the challenges identified as pressing in the post-truth era, IL must evolve to be responsive to the unique ways that AI-generated information impacts individuals and society.