Harvesting Library Labour in an AI World: The Grim Reaping of Library Work(ers) and What We Can Do About It - keynote presentation

 

“You must give to get, You must sow the seed, before you can reap the harvest.” ~ Scott Reed

The growth of GenAI, LLMs, and chatbots threaten many established ways of performing academic work, and is already resulting in labour concerns for library workers. This keynote considers the impact of AI on scholarly publishing work in academic libraries.

All aspects of the scholarly publishing life cycle (Submit, Review, Decide, Edit and Preserve) have the potential for a deep impact from AI, and are therefore relevant for the library community to consider. Scholarly publishing work is also deeply intertwined with the open access movement, where processes and outputs are often done ‘out in the open’, and are therefore ripe for harvesting by A.I. for reuse. 

What are the potential consequences of this brand of cognitive offloading in the scholarly publishing process? And what are the labour implications for library workers, authors and publishers, when A.I. tools begin to do this work?

In this keynote, librarians Tim Ribaric and Cecile Farnum will consider the role libraries may play in both augmenting and striving against AI, using a critical lens that is skeptical of the difference between what the promise of AI is, compared to the reality of what it will bring.