Encyclopaedia Automatica

Collaborative Prompt Engineering with a Higher Purpose

Introducing Encyclopaedia Automatica: collaborative prompt engineering with a higher purpose.

It combines the best of human-driven knowledge–wikis–with the best tech–GPT–to make something new.

ChatGPT is changing the world and many of us are struggling to keep up. Some are afraid for their jobs; some want to ban it.

We need to find ways to work with this new tech to get the best of humans and the best of computers, together, rather than thinking in terms of one or the other.

Encyclopaedia Automatica is a start in that direction.

As of today, computers write pretty good articles but lack the direction and insight of human editors. On the other hand, does it make sense for humans to make every little edit on a wiki manually?

Why not combine humans and computers?

Here’s how it works:

1. You create a new article on the encyclopedia like CheeseBurger or Espresso

2. If you notice something you’d like to fix, you prompt GPT to fix it. For example:

   1. “Make this section longer”

   2. “Add more information about coffee”

   3. “Change the tone here to be more formal”

We use human feedback to make the articles better, but machines do all the grunt work. It’s collaborative prompt engineering with a higher purpose.

Just like a wiki, you can explore the history of an article and revert any changes. Unlike a wiki, all the images are automatically and quickly generated like above.

Just like a wiki, you can edit and add articles to your heart’s content. Unlike a wiki, all the hard work is done for you.

You become an editor; you shape articles collaboratively rather than write them directly.

Just like a wiki, the content is available as Creative Commons to remix. Unlike a wiki, you don’t need to learn any special tools to edit it.

I’d love to see what you can build with it. Let me know what you think on discord, email and X.