The boosting of artificial intelligence by big technology firms, big financial firms, and government agencies is not separate from book bans, educational censorship efforts, and the war on education, libraries, and government workers being pushed by groups like the Heritage Foundation and any number of MAGA groups across the United States. This long-running war on knowledge and expertise has sown the ground for the narratives widely used by AI companies and the CEOs adopting it. Human labor, inquiry, creativity, and expertise is spurned in the name of “efficiency.

This a terrible poetic irony here that the current wave of success that “AI” has experienced in the areas that it has like protein folding prediction are in an essential way just crude restatements of the supreme value and importance of the librarian who curates information into structured databases and systems that can be shared, depended upon and interacted with in new generative ways that were not possible before. This happens as if by magic as after all the librarian has barely added any information and they certainly haven’t changed any of it, rather somehow just the process of thoughtfully structuring the information and setting it into a context appears to be the crucial genesis.

I think in order to heal from all of this AI bullshit we need to consciously recenter the librarian and the library as the essential aspects of machine intelligence however we choose to define that at any point in time.

If you are inspired by the successes of AI and disagree, look to the structured, curated datasets that powered them and ask yourself what kind of person and what kind of skillset is really the most valuable function in the whole process and the answer is indisputably another echo of the classic mantra “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, it is the librarians and libraries that imbue power to these new technologies, just because the power is refracted and distorted through a complex automated process doesn’t change that.

The company says that it believes this software will streamline the arduous task school libraries face when trying to comply with legislation that bans certain books and curricula

Yeah no that’s a bad thing, stop banning books

By keeping the population stupid they are easier to control and how better to do that than creating an AI that drip feeds knowledge that’s controlled by those controlling the AI, just enough for the sheepole to know that they are slaves and can utilise just enough grey matter to know how to serve their masters.