The First Workshop of a Public AI Assistant to World Wide Knowledge (WWK)

The Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Lab, with sponsorship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), is organizing an invitation-only workshop focused on the concept of a public AI Assistant to World Wide Knowledge (WWK) and its implications for the future of the Free Web.

The workshop aims to convene a multidisciplinary community of public, private, and research stakeholders to present and refine the concept of WWK—a 21st-century world's public library of knowledge on the internet. This free public space, transcending language and geographic barriers, will provide strictly facts-based, unbiased, ads-free, and well-referenced information to everyone.

Our event aims to inspire and build a foundational community of educators, journalists, social scientists, historians, technologists, and potential sponsors in the public, non-profit, and private sectors. Together, we plan to launch and scale WWK, promoting accurate and freely accessible knowledge as a fundamental human right. Additionally, the Public AI assistant will make research more accessible to students and scholars, potentially ushering in an era of significant knowledge expansion.

Objectives of the Workshop:

1. Accelerate the adoption of reliable AI systems by educators, professionals, and individuals to discover knowledge, combat misinformation and bias, and correct under-representations of minority populations and opinions.
2. Develop an AI-augmented platform that effectively disseminates knowledge and addresses the current state of web-based knowledge.
3. Raise awareness among funders about the risks and opportunities of applying AI in the context of web-based knowledge and inspire support for the WWK initiative.

This workshop will feature a pilot demonstration of the OVAL lab's Public AI Assistant (https://WWKnowledge.org), developed in collaboration with Wikimedia, Columbia School of Journalism, Northwestern University, Stanford Center for African Studies, and Stanford Big Local News. The assistant has been used by 200,000 users from 175 countries to research the internet. Deployed on platforms like Wikimedia and the Knight Election Hub, this assistant supports natural language queries of Wikidata and FEC data. It has been used in education and research, leading to revisions to African History and investigative reports. Notably, WWKnowledge.org, developed using the Genie Agent Framework, can be rapidly expanded with new knowledge corpora and datasets through worldwide contributions.