Your Name and Title: Sarah Appedu, PhD Student
Library, School, or Organization Name: Syracuse University, School of Information Studies
Co-Presenter Name(s): N/A
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Syracuse, NY
Language in Which You Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): Library practitioners and educators
Short Session Description (one line): Enough is Enough: Refusing AI in Libraries
Full Session Description (as long as you would like):
Throughout the past two years, we have been inundated with rhetoric about the almost-too-good-to-be-true potential of AI to transform our lives. From self-driving cars to ChatGPT to the machine learning algorithms deciding who gets healthcare, home loans, adopted, AI technologies are being deployed across every intersection of public service. While AI is commonly discussed in the realm of library services like reference and information literacy, where librarians are helping students, faculty, and members of the public use and navigate these tools, AI is becoming an auspicious character in library information technology. From Elsevier to JSTOR, database vendors are increasingly moving away from their traditional role of disseminating scholarly material and instead are themselves becoming data brokers entangled in the cycle of AI creation. AI tools are being offered to librarians as solutions to their problems – it will make you more efficient, help you get more reliable information, make the arduous work of being human less difficult.
No where in this rhetoric will the material challenges of librarianship be mentioned. The cultural wars being leveraged against people in positions of protecting the right to information, the budget cuts across public and academic divisions, the rising expectation that librarians will serve as social workers to address the lack of social services in their communities, are all problems that go well beyond the scope of any AI technology. So why is AI taking up so much space in our discourse, conferences, budgets, instruction? What factors lead librarians to prioritize a tool that they know to be not only harmful, but deeply incompatible with their professional values of privacy, equity, democracy, and the public good?
This presentation will examine what AI refusal might look like and facilitate a discussion around what it would mean to say, “enough is enough!” to AI in libraries. There is a growing movement among scholars, activists, and educators to not only think critically about AI and its outputs, but to actively shape and resist its supposedly inevitable trajectory. How are we already doing this, and what challenges prevent us from doing so? How can librarians actively shape the discourse around AI in our communities and serve as pivotal educators on the unavoidable harms of implementing AI into our libraries? How can we demonstrate leadership on what an ethics of AI refusal would mean for the well-being of our community?
Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session: N/A
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