The three of us talk monthly in the Libraries Lead podcast (available at librarieslead.libraryjournal.com), and share content from that segment of the podcast in digital and print form through Library Journal. In this month’s column we talk about:

•    Generative artificial intelligence (AI)
•    AI in libraries resource guide
•    Karen Hao’s Empire of AI book

David Lankes
University of Texas at Austin

I want to highlight tech journalist Ed Zitron, who’s keeping track and commenting on the business aspects of AI. In an interview with Brooke Gladstone on the On The Media podcast, Ed talked about looming AI (more specifically, the Generative AI “bubble” and related issues). Go listen to it!

It’s brilliant to begin with, but what was very interesting are his points about AI being a “big bubble” and the investment that’s going on is based on a sort of sleight of hand. That is, they’ve been talking about generative AI and large language models as if that was truly artifical INTELLIGENCE. According to Ed, it’s not. Generative AI is reformatting and re-sorting and probabilistic use of words and text. It’s powerful and useful, but it’s not intelligent. However, we do see glimpses of more sophisticated AI and deep learning in medical imaging and other areas Ed says that he’s very positive around AI, but he’s very negative on generative AI. 

He also points out that Generative AI is sucking the innovation out of Silicon Valley. All this investment, all this money, all this time, all this effort, trying to find a use case. And it’s just taking more and more resources to the point where the next cool thing or the next innovation isn’t happening because everything’s gotta be around generative AI. So please, if you have a chance, take a listen to this interview.

Beth Patin
Syracuse University

Congratulations to Dr. Wan-Chen Lee of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, recipient of the American Library Association’s prestigious Carnegie Whitney Grant. Dr. Lee’s groundbreaking work focuses on the ethical implications of AI in libraries. As part of her project, she developed a comprehensive resource guide featuring 137 articles, videos, podcasts, courses, and tutorials produced between 2020 and 2024 designed to help librarians make informed decisions about AI, better understand its potential impacts, and support library users in navigating ethical concerns. It also serves as a valuable tool for library and information science educators and students as they consider how to teach and engage with these emerging issues.

The conversation about AI and ethics is becoming urgent, particularly as public interactions with AI tools grow more complex. This summer, a viral TikTok story highlighted troubling dynamics when individuals began relying on chatbots to interpret personal experiences. In this case, a woman misinterpreted her psychiatrist’s professional interactions as romantic interest, with AI tools reinforcing her false beliefs.

These incidents align with recent research by Danish psychiatrist Dr. Soren Ostergaard, who hypothesized that AI and chatbots could potentially trigger delusions in individuals prone to psychosis. His work has since gained momentum as more qualitative data emerges about how people form emotional attachments to AI.

Mike Eisenberg
University of Washington

My AI Watch is a must-read book, Empire of AI, by technology journalist Karen Hao. This book has blown my mind. Hao is a tech insider (embedded with Sam Altman and the folks at OpenAI for a time), and goes into tremendous detail and unearthed some important truths—with meticulous documentation.

The overriding premise of the book is that today’s AI empires are similar to the exploitive, colonial empires of the past. “Like empires of old, there were a small group of people at the top that were able to make decisions for everyone else around the world. And basically everyone else around the world didn’t have agency, didn't have say, and they lived in the thrash of the decisions that were happening at the top based on the whims of the people at the top. And we are now basically in the same situation. It’s not that it's overtly violent...we’ve kind of tempered the violence, but there is the same kind of exploitation and extraction.”

Hao gives specific examples including the mistreatment of “fact-checking” workers in Kenya, and the use of using massive amounts of fresh water from communities in Chile. Physically, the AI overlords are seizing up land for data centers, and virtually, they’re seizing up online data from people, authors, and artists without realization or permission.

Lastly, Hao is not totally against AI. What she rejects “…is the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from, indeed will ever emerge from, a vision of the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency and our worth, including the value of our labor and art towards an ultimately imperial centralized project.”

For references to the AI Watch, go to: https://librarieslead.libraryjournal.com/2025/09/01/endumbification/#references