Category: Artificial Intelligence

Stuff about AI

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Lankes’ Next Book to be Published by MIT Press


I am thrilled to announce that I’m returning to MIT Press for my next book, working title, Accidental Architects of the Digital Age: How Computer, Information, and Data Science Built AI and the Future due out in 2028. Here’s a brief overview.

We are all looking for someone to blame. Our social media feeds are filled with advertisements that know a little too much about us, or with an anger engineered to keep us scrolling. Story after story tells us that AI is simultaneously good enough to take our jobs and untested enough to damage our children. Our phones drain our attention in ways that feel deliberate. Someone must have planned this. Surely a harmful actor is at work.

Except there isn’t one. There is no master plan. No single company, no secret committee, no Bond villain in a data center designed the world in which we live. What we have instead is something stranger and, in many ways, harder to fix. We have three separate traditions of thought, each with centuries of history, each solving its own problems, each building its own tools, each operating on its own assumptions about what matters and what can safely be ignored. And over the past few decades those three traditions collided. Not deliberately. Not through negotiation or shared purpose. They just grew into the same spaces, wired into the same systems, and produced something none of them intended.

Accidental Architects of the Digital Age: How Computer, Information, and Data Science Built AI and the Future argues that nobody designed the digital world. It grew out of three intellectual traditions, each pursuing its own ends. Computer science provided the algorithms. Information science provided the structures that let a person find what they needed. Data science provided the patterns hidden in accumulated observation. Each succeeded on its own terms, and each succeeded well enough that the search engine, the recommendation feed, and the large language model became possible. What none of the three can fully account for is what they built together. The ground between the three worldviews is where the hard questions of this moment sit, and it is the only place the answers are going to come from.

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Literacy, AI, and the Shock

Library Journal turned 150 this year, and it was an honor to write a piece for the anniversary. Mine ran September 1 as part of the “Faith in Our Future” series.

The argument will be familiar to anyone following the Information Shock work. Generative AI authors in two ways. The first produces document-like objects, and for those, AI literacy is the right approach. The second happens inside the exchange itself, where a person and a system build understanding together and no document is doing the mediating. That is where literacy runs out of things to grip.

What the exchange calls for is a role rather than another competency. Someone in the room has to be accountable for what a person leaves believing. A chatbot cannot be. It answers to no community, and it holds to no prior word. Librarians can be. I think the survival of the profession depends on claiming it.

The first issue of Library Journal declared librarianship a profession before there were library schools or credentials to back the claim. Dewey and his colleagues made the profession by naming the role they intended to fill. That is what this moment asks of us again.

Read the piece at Library Journal. Free registration required.

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Librarianship, After the Information Shock

Lankes, R. D. (2026). Librarianship, After the Information Shock. Journal of New Librarianship, 11(2), 140–143. https://doi.org/10.33011/newlibs/21/10

Abstract: In 2019 I wrote of the need for a new librarianship centered on knowledge, and the learning conversation. While that argument holds seven years later, I did not anticipate that those conversations could be held with a non-human conversant. This is causing an Information Shock whose impact goes far beyond the synthetic documents AI can produce, only an extension of the last shock. The deeper disruption is that AI can now instill beliefs, true and false, without accountability. This goes well beyond current efforts in AI literacy. It calls for a full embrace of the new librarianship and a new role for librarians as the accountable conversant in these AI-Human exchanges, standing on the side of the person to ground understanding in evidence and culture. We must claim that role now, because whether this shock unfolds through opaque commercial systems or something for the public good remains a choice.

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The AI-Induced Shock

“The AI-Induced Shock” Keynote Panel Presentation. IFLA World Library and Information Congress. Busan, South Korea (video).

Abstract: Generative AI is not just flooding the world with more content. It is changing where understanding gets made. In a live chat exchange, meaning is built between a person and a machine, and no stable object is left behind to point to, check, or hold accountable. That is what makes this moment a genuine break, not a louder version of the information shock our field absorbed 80 years ago. AI literacy still works on synthetic essays and fabricated citations. It has nothing to grip when the only output of an exchange is what someone now believes. This talk proposes a role for librarians in that gap: the accountable conversant, a credible person building trusted places and answerable for what people carry away.

Video:

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It’s Worse Than That

When I talk about a Generative AI-induced Information Shock, I am neither endorsing the current state of things nor claiming this form of AI is inevitable. If anything, my intention is to rally action in the face of the shock.

There is a reason people are adopting AI chat so rapidly and so widely. It is human nature to seek to learn, and to build relationships with those we find informative. We have an entire neurotransmitter system in our brains that rewards learning (dopamine, anyone). That system has been hijacked and monetized, and it remains a vital part of what it is to be human.

So it is natural for people to seek out answers and build affective relationships with AI tools that anthropomorphize the technology. Our brains evolved to attribute intention and consciousness to the things we converse with.

This underlying human need to learn is why AI arrives as a shock rather than an evolution. It is also why the concern moving forward is no longer the flood of document-like objects AI can produce. It is the flood of unsubstantiated beliefs it can produce.

There is now evidence for how far that goes. A recent preprint shows the exchange can move what a person believes even when the person has been warned to be on guard.

Individual-level interventions against sycophantic AI reduce its appeal but not its persuasiveness

In two preregistered experiments, backed by a pooled analysis covering about 3,982 people, Ye, Kraut, and Rathje warned users that an AI chatbot was flattering them before they ever used it. Some read a warning. Others watched the same bot validate people on opposite sides of the same argument. The warnings worked on judgment. Users rated the AI as less objective and trusted it less. The warnings did nothing to belief. Those same users walked away more certain and more extreme in their positions. Knowing the exchange was working on them did not stop it from moving what they believed.

This is why information scientists need to pay particular attention to the learning literature right now. Concepts like cognitive offloading and zones of AI learning engagement are strong directions we can use when we center the exchange in our research and practice. These studies show what is happening inside the exchange (the changes to knowledge), and they gesture toward means to modify and optimize those exchanges.

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We are at the Start of an Information Shock

Generative AI isn’t just producing more information. It’s dissolving the document, the organizing unit that information science and librarianship have been built around for over a century. I’m calling this an Information Shock.

The short version of the argument was just published at Information Matters: [https://informationmatters.org/2026/07/ai-information-shock-and-a-new-information-science/]. It makes the core case in about a thousand words: AI creates a new kind of authorship with no stable object to catalog, retrieve, cite, or verify. That’s not a skills gap. It’s a structural problem for the field.

The longer version is a preprint on SocArXiv, submitted to the Journal of Documentation: [https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/36a97_v1]. That paper traces a historical pattern: the field has faced information shocks before, from cuneiform to the postwar data explosion, and each time rebuilt around a new object and a new professional identity. AI is the next such moment, and the field’s current responses, including AI literacy, aren’t scaled to what’s actually changing.

I’ll be writing more here about Information Shock and what it means for libraries and information science. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For those who want the formal summary, here’s the abstract of the Journal of Documentation piece:

Purpose. This paper argues that AI authoring is prompting an Information Shock and a new information science. The shock is not a matter of increased volume and variable quality of AI produced information. It comes as generative AI creates a new kind of author that dissolves the document, the field’s organizing unit. This forces a reconstitution of tools, literacies, and identity.

Design/methodology/approach. The paper applies a conceptual framework drawn from the history of Information Shocks, tracing how disruptions from cuneiform to post-World War II research data forced the field to rebuild around new objects and practices. AI is analyzed against that pattern.

Findings. AI produces two modes of authorship: document-like objects that enter existing infrastructures, and transactional, co-authored exchanges with no stable unit to catalog, retrieve, cite, or verify. The second mode renders AI literacy inadequate, even in its current forms, because they presuppose an identifiable object and human interlocutors. Anticipated changes reach professional identity, tools, intellectual property, and education.

Research limitations/implications. The argument is theoretical and prospective, and some anticipated changes remain speculative. The Information Shock outlined is anticipated to have major impacts for librarians and information professionals moving forward.

Originality/value. The paper offers a historically grounded distinction between document-producing and transactional AI authorship, arguing that in this mode a nonhuman conversant takes the mediating position the field has long held.

Keywords. Artificial intelligence, generative AI, Information Shock, documentalism, information literacy, authorship, professional identity

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AI Free* Version of Triptych Now Available

TL;DR version: if you would rather read my latest book, Triptych, without the distraction of AI, then I have put out a new AI Free version. You can buy the new edition on Amazon. The content is the same, save for illustrations and AI generated discussion questions. New cover is from licensed stock art. The content is virtually identical in other ways (with a few edits made).

The first published version of Triptych used artificial intelligence to create images and a series of conversation starters used at the end of each lecture. As I stated in that version:

“I take my responsibility as an author and as a scholar seriously. That means having full ownership of the text and in writing from a place of experience… For me it [AI] is a tool and one I feel I need to use to better understand and write about. That said, I very much look to engage in a conversation about AI, the mission of librarians, and its impact in society.”

And a conversation was indeed had. Several reviewers and people I respect pointed out a key problem with including some AI-generated material in the book: it introduces a sort of fatigue when engaging the text. While a reader wants to be engaging the ideas, the even peripheral use of AI adds a sort of lingering doubt. Is what I am reading written by AI?

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Death, AI, and Librarianship

“Death, AI, and Librarianship” Keynote. Internet Librarian 2025 Conference

Abstract: In a time of rising social isolation, ideological division, and technological upheaval, libraries stand at a crossroads. Lankes shares thoughts from his new book and delivers a bold, urgent, and deeply human call to action for the library profession. From confronting the rise of book bans and the erosion of intellectual freedom to navigating the ethical minefields of AI, he explores the evolving identity of librarianship in the 21st century and champions the power of storytelling, the necessity of joy in the face of adversity, and the radical inclusion of “feral librarians”—those who enter the profession through unconventional paths but embody its deepest values.

InternetLibKeynote25Download

Transcript

Transcript (AI generated):

00:00:01
Good morning. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Jane. I really appreciate the opportunity to come speak to you today. I am always thrilled to be part of this conference. It’s a great group of people getting to know them and working on a regular basis. So, without further ado, because hearing me mutter on is not necessarily that helpful, I’m going to do the infamous look at my slides for the next 45 minutes or so, and hopefully then we’ll have time for a conversation over on feed loops. So, let’s make sure everything is having a good moment. There we go.

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