Information as Currency: The Social and Cultural Value of Knowledge in the Algorithmic Age

In recent years, generative artificial intelligence (AI) content has been integrated into everyday life. Generative AI tools produce meal plans and shape travel itineraries, often without clear source acknowledgment or attribution. Rapid expansion of generative AI warrants renewed attention and focus on the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education’s Information Has Value frame. Novice learners have difficulty understanding the value of information when free information is abundant.1 Generative AI further complicates this and issues of authorship, equity, and trust. In the algorithmic age, information operates as economic, social, and cultural currency with its value being shaped equally by technologies, human intentions, and novice learners’ assumptions about AI authority. Unlike value, which suggests a fixed