Author: Michael

Dante’s Hell is populated by those “who have lost the good of the intellect.” They have passed through the gate over which are inscribed the words, “Abandon all hope, you who enter here” (Inferno, Canto III). Dante’s vision is didactic as well as poetic. Through his art, he seeks to awaken the imaginations of the living to reflect on their anticipations, desires, and commitments. Are they too small, confused, malformed, or harmful to them and others?

Many are fearful or at least anxious about AI. I think what most people are concerned about is losing what is good about human intelligence. This is a valid and pressing concern: The history and future of AI is about automating more and more tasks—good, bad, and ugly—which previously required human intelligence. 

In my new book, Hope in the Library, I describe libraries as places of hope. Over their entrances should be inscribed the words, “Attend to all hope, you who enter here.” Throughout their long history, by cultivating human attention and agency, libraries have helped us preserve, enhance, and direct the good of the intellect through significant social and technological changes. They also can help us imagine and create more meaningful work with AI.

I do not believe we can create an AI Paradiso. In the Apocalypse of John, which I discuss in connection with AI in my previous book, the image of that ideal is called New Jerusalem—the absolutely new and true city of peace. But if we pursue greater hopes, loves, and beliefs, as Dante’s Inferno encourages us to do, I believe we can create something closer to Francis Bacon’s utopian New Bensalem, the child of the city of peace. 

My hope for Hope in the Library is that it will inspire hope for ourselves, our societies, our species, our world, and the institution that can continue to help improve all of these: the library.

Image: William Blake’s drawing of Dante and Virgil entering the gate of Hell (1827).

A few weeks ago, I visited an exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark called “The Irreplaceable Human—Conditions of Creativity in the Age of AI.” The scale and substance of the exhibition was impressive: it presented a number of installations provoking reflections on how we can continue to curate and cultivate human creativity as we increasingly integrate AI into our work and lives. The exhibition’s artists and commentators argue that creativity—the ability to create new and valuable things—is an inherent part of human nature and our narratives. Our capacity for creativity has enabled us to evolve, survive, develop, and thrive as a species.

One project that was of particular interest to me was Yuri Pattison’s Open Stacks (2023). The installation included ranges of library shelves, empty but for a few computers. In this seemingly abandoned library, the computers’ monitors and headphones presented a video and narrative created with AI. The images included vacated and decaying readings rooms; the narrative was about how AI absorbed, replaced, and superseded libraries. The human institution of the library, which created a diverse and dynamic information environment, has been reduced to a recursive, homogenous, and commercialized information marketplace. The narrative asks if this is the final chapter for human creativity—or if we still have agency as authors and librarians.

A generation ago, we had to articulate and discern the relationship between the library and the internet. The best strategies we implemented focused on augmenting library resources, services, and spaces rather than annihilating them. Now we are having similar conversations about AI, which holds great promise for further transforming libraries and the ways they curate and cultivate human creativity. The history of the library is a history of sustaining the hope that there is always something new and valuable happening. Those coming new creations, and the practices of human evaluation that attend to and enable access to them, is work that should not be—and likely cannot be—fully automated.

One of the great challenges—and opportunities—of our age is the pursuit of digital wisdom. To thrive in our digitally enabled and enhanced information environment, we need to learn how to design and use digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) wisely so that we may become wiser. Right now, this includes discerning how AI may be integrated wisely into our lives and world. Libraries have an important role in creating a better information environment for human as well as artificial agents.

The Role of Libraries

Our emergence as a species is connected with our capacity for reflective attention. The ability to discern information in our environment and to think about it reflectively and imaginatively—instead of reflexively and automatically—set us on a trajectory that resulted in the creation of complex information societies. As we became dependent on the ancient ICTs of writing and textual artifacts, libraries were developed in diverse contexts to enable the discovery, use, creation, and sharing of knowledge.

To manage attention and information, libraries begin with an intention to configure an intellectual ordering of reality represented by textual expressions of knowledge. This goal, defined by particular communities, involves the selection and collection of texts judged worthy of attention. It also involves the mediation of access to this collection—as well as the broader context for discovery a library curates—through social and technological systems that enable human agency within an information environment. 

Library intentions, selections, and mediations have changed and grown in complexity as ICTs have changed. The digital transformation of libraries—the integration of digital ICTs into library resources, services, and spaces—has been underway for decades. Libraries automated many technical operations in the 1960s, including cataloging, acquisitions, resource management, and circulation. In the 1970s, through collaborative consortia and networked computers, libraries developed automated processes for information exchange. Libraries created new automated discovery and retrieval services through online public catalogs and remote databases in the 1980s. By the end of twentieth century, libraries were providing online access to local as well as global resources. As they were digitizing information resources and services, librarians also developed the concept and practice of information literacy—which enables people to identify information needs and find, evaluate, and use information to fulfill those needs. Over the last twenty years, digital resources, services, and spaces have become thoroughly integrated into most libraries.

Today, libraries are being rapidly and radically transformed by new automated and artificial intelligence technologies—technologies that will profoundly change how people discover, use, create, and share information. A generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), which predicts plausible responses to requests based on past language patterns, is a significant AI technology that is already changing how people engage with and think about information. Many libraries are exploring how this technology may be used to advance knowledge discovery and creation. If wisely integrated into libraries, this technology could significantly augment human attention and agency. The digital wisdom needed to realize that goal begins with reflection on a number of ethical questions.

Information Ethics and GPTs

For several decades, the field of information ethics has explored various ethical issues to assess the impacts—as well as guide the implementation—of new and emerging ICTs. An instance of a GPT, such as ChatGPT, touches many (if not all) of the concerns of information ethics. 

Consider, for example, the following issues and questions.

1. Authenticity: Does ChatGPT provide meaningful information or rather false information (misinformation)? ChatGPTs information sources are obscure, but it is clear not all of them are good. Additionally, the current version of ChatGPT does not always provide accurate information and is well known for its tendency to fabricate or “hallucinate” misinformation. OpenAI warns that, “While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice.”
2. Access: Is access to ChatGPT equitable? This question concerns not only access to the technology itself, but also to the technologies and skills needed to use it well. At this point, the business model for ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI is not clear or stable. Many GPTs are commercial products and require user contributions of personal data as well as subscriptions for advanced models. Best practices for using ChatGPT are, at best, provisional.
3. Diversity: Is ChatGPT inclusive of diverse perspectives? Given the lack of transparency around the texts used to train ChatGPT, as well as about human interventions meant to mitigate bias and bad information (or malinformation), it is unclear how diverse and inclusive ChatGPT is. There are questions about censorship, too, as different groups call for the exclusion of certain perspectives from their information environments.
4. Property: There are many open questions about ChatGPT and copyright and intellectual property rights—about ownership rights of the content on which ChatGPT is trained, on who owns its outputs and the content created in connection with its use, and about how cases for fair or transformative use will be defended when content is automatically and cryptically generated.
5. Privacy: How does ChatGPT access, protect, and use personal information? OpenAI warns that, “Conversations may be reviewed by our AI trainers to improve our systems” and, further, advises against sharing “any sensitive information in your conversations.” If you ask Chat GPT about privacy, you will get responses that promise anonymity and encryption but caution that “no system or service can guarantee complete security and privacy.”
6. Security: Does ChatGPT protect people from—or expose people to—online harm? There has been at least one case in which users’ questions were publicly exposed. If you ask ChatGPT how secure it is, it asserts that user data is restricted to “authorized personnel” and that OpenAI has implemented controls to prevent unauthorized access to or misuse of user data.
7. Community: Does ChatGPT foster harmonious relations among people, help cultivate citizenship, and serve the common good? When I asked ChatGPT how it serves the common good, it claimed a number of positive applications: creating mental health chatbots; developing interactive learning tools to help students learn and retain information more effectively; generating virtual assistants to help people with disabilities access information and services more easily; and analyzing and synthesizing large amounts of data to help researchers in fields such as medicine and environmental science make new discoveries and insights. ChatGPT acknowledges it also can cause social harms: it can be used to lie and slander, amplify biases and inequities, cheat and steal, disrupt relationships and jobs, and much more.

GPTs have the potential to enhance teaching, research, writing, coding and all the other work we do to process and act on information. But the intentions, selections, and mediations of GPTs need to be critiqued, governed, and reformed further to ensure that human attention and agency may be helped rather than harmed.

From Information to Wisdom

Libraries have always used ICTs to help people attend to and work with information. Through their intentional approaches to information, their selection of information resources, and their mediations of information access and use, libraries have cultivated human attention and agency to augmented human intelligence for millennia. Now, this work includes automated information processing and artificial agents. Increasingly complex forms of AI will continue to transform libraries and our information environment. Drawing on their histories and experiences of technological adaptation and ethical practice, libraries are well positioned to lead digitally wise social and technological transformations with AI.

For an introduction to information ethics, see Foundations of Information Ethics, edited by John T. F. Burgess and Emily J. M. Knox (ALA Neal-Schuman, 2019).

The COVID-19 pandemic was an apocalyptic event. It was apocalyptic in the popular sense of the word, in that the pandemic was a sudden and global catastrophe. But the pandemic was also apocalyptic in a more literal sense, as an uncovering of deeper realities. The pandemic quickly became an infodemic; it exposed and exacerbated systemic racial, economic, and other social inequities; and it revealed many of the problems and much of the potential of emerging technologies. Before the pandemic, it was clear to many that it was past time, in the words of Ruha Benjamin, “to reimagine what is possible” (Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code [Polity, 2019], 1). Now, as we emerge from the pandemic, there is a unique opportunity to learn from this apocalyptic moment and strive “for another and a juster world” (W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [Penguin, 2018], 63).

Libraries have been central in the discovery, creation, and sharing of knowledge for millennia. Initially, the aims of libraries were modest and imperialistic. More recently, guided by professionals responsive to social and cultural dynamics, libraries have become significant sites for cultivating individual and collective agency. (See, e.g., Wayne Wiegand’s Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library [Oxford University Press, 2015]). Uniquely situated within both local communities and global networks, librarians and libraries are well positioned to help shape a better post-pandemic world—a world that also will be postdigital.

Librarians have participated in a trajectory of digital transformation since the middle of the 20th century: automating operations and access, digitizing resources and digitalizing services, and developing new platforms and accompanying formative practices. All of these changes enabled libraries to sustain many core programs during the pandemic, but the nearly all-digital work of librarians revealed dimensions of the library that cannot be automated or adequately mediated digitally. These pre- and extra-digital elements of the library—human-scaled interfaces, fully embodied interactions, collaborations unconstrained by software designs, data and algorithmic autonomy, temporal and physical constraints, and environmental responsibilities—provide insights into future priorities for the library. Technological advances accelerated by the pandemic, such as artificial intelligence, will continue to transform our world. (See, esp., Luciano Floridi’s The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality [Oxford University Press, 2014]).

But libraries have always been about augmenting intelligence—indeed, libraries themselves are technologies for intelligence augmentation—and librarians can draw from a deep history of information access, attention, and agency to critique and integrate wisely into our lives transformative technologies such as AI. Ours is a time for postdigital librarianship: a critical and constructive approach to digital enhancements that lead to better futures after the digital has lost its salience. (For a discussion of “postdigital,” see Jeremy Knox, “What Does the ‘Postdigital’ Mean for Education?,” Postdigital Science and Education1 [2019]: 357-70.)

A few years ago, I began thinking of the future of the library in terms of a post-digital future. By “post-digital” I do not mean a post-apocalyptic library, like the analog libraries reconstructed after the nuclear war in William Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz or after the flu pandemic in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. I am thinking of a time not when digital infrastructure collapses but when it is taken for granted—when the qualifier “digital” is no longer necessary.

When I went to library school some twenty years ago, the digital libraries we built were more like digital cabinets of curiosities—selected or small collections of things that could be digitized and publicly shared. Libraries had special departments for this work, and as interesting and as expensive as it was, it was not typically a core function within any library. Libraries were, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, already digital in many ways: online catalogs and research databases, as well as electronic journals and books, were common. But libraries as entities were largely synonymous with their buildings and the people, materials, and functions contained within them. Some of us, though, who used online public catalogs and found through libraries resources on the open web, sensed that libraries were extending beyond their traditional boundaries.

When I became a library director about a decade ago, I became more intentional about thinking about the library as a hybrid entity—our resources, services, and spaces were both non-digital and digital. As libraries like mine pressed into integrating digital technologies into every dimension of our work, we added more digital resources, services, platforms, and expertise to function online as well as offline. As we did this, we emerged as leaders within our institutions in areas such as digital literacy, digital pedagogy, digital scholarship, and digital institutional transformation. 

A few weeks ago, many of our libraries became entirely mediated through digital technologies. We closed our buildings, we suspended the circulation of physical materials locally and throughout our networks, and we moved all of our services online. In all of my communications, I am careful to say that the library building is closed; library resources, services, and staff remain accessible online. 

Fortunately, after many years of investing in digital resources and infrastructure—and in cultivating digital expertise among my faculty and staff—we were ready for this sudden and complete digital shift. We were even able to add new resources and services. But when people ask if the library is open, and we respond that it is online, we know that we are not fully functional. And we lament that.

When I imagine the future form of the library, it is neither purely digital, online, nor purely physical, offline. It is the best of both of these—a blend of digitally networked enhancements to physically situated experiences, adaptable to individual and community needs and preferences. The qualitative difference is like that between the internet, virtual reality, and chatbots and the Internet of Things, mixed reality, and robots.

The present pandemic has revealed the impressive extent to which libraries have become digital. There is of course more work to be done—especially related to improving digital presence and place beyond video conferencing and learning management systems. But now, I am looking forward most to creating what comes next: the post-digital library.