Defining AI Literacy (from the Library Perspective)
Since ChatGPT went mainstream in 2022 and took the tech world by storm, librarians have been navigating the changes this new technology brings to information ecosystems.
From Co-Pilot being embedded in our institutional email to research databases like EbscoHost and JSTOR rolling out “AI research assistants,” our work and our field is changing as fast as any other industry. As LMU grapples with the impact of AI in the classroom, librarians are uniquely situated to assess AI’s impact on knowledge production and to track the way information is now being presented to our students and faculty (see also: Google’s AI summaries).
Admittedly, as librarians we tend to see most things through the lens of information literacy: the set of integrated abilities that includes the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, the use of information in creating new knowledge, and participating ethically in communities of learning. From our perspective—and at the risk of being overly reductive—AI is yet another information “source” that students must learn to evaluate. So moving from teaching students information literacy to teaching “AI literacy” is less of a jump and more of a side-step.
Leo S. Lo, university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Virginia, defines AI literacy as the ability to understand, use, and think critically about AI technologies and their impact on society, ethics, and everyday life. AI literacy is complex: the term itself evokes different definitions depending on one’s discipline or industry. For librarians, we study how AI (i.e., generative AI) impacts research and learning—all of which informs how we teach information literacy more broadly.
For example, LMU librarians Susan Archambault, Nicole L. Murph, and Shalini Ramachandran published “Fostering AI Literacy in Undergraduates: A ChatGPT Workshop Case Study” in Library Trends which discusses how to develop AI literacy curricula that integrates ethical considerations and critical reflection into prompt engineering. In the same journal, Murph published “Beyond Information Literacy: Exploring AI’s Impact on Labor in Academic Libraries,” a reflection on the ramifications and ethical implications of AI’s impact on labor in academic libraries. We encourage you to explore the same issue, where you will find other scholarly articles about AI written by librarians discussing ethics, perceptions, teaching methods, biases, critical refusal, and decolonization.
AI’s Impact on Academic Libraries
Academic libraries play an integral role in responding to the ethical and practical aspects of AI for our students. This includes collaborating with campus stakeholders and designing and implementing various forms of AI literacy instruction. Reflecting upon the U.S. Department of Education’s report on artificial intelligence, Leo Lo highlights this essential need for academic libraries to promote AI literacy: to expand beyond information literacy to help students understand how AI tools work and the ethical issues they introduce.
Whether we want it or not, information vendors (e.g., database providers, publishers, research platforms) are embedding AI into the resources we provide our students and faculty, impacting library services from collection management and metadata creation to research and access. Regardless, people remain at the core of our work, and we are committed to enhancing library services for our students, faculty, and staff. Transparency, data privacy, and ethical uses of information are values that academic libraries uphold. We aim to be in dialogue with our campus community to help all of us understand the implications of AI, to establish guidelines for the use of AI technologies, and to ensure we remain true to the ethical standards of our profession and our university.
Libraries: Part of the AI Conversation
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a professional organization that serves academic and research libraries, recently released a revised “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” Since 2016, this framework has guided how academic librarians approach teaching research. In revising the standards, the ACRL added this:
“The ubiquity of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), is reshaping how we interact with information, raising practical, social, critical, and ethical considerations. […] As traditional boundaries between knowledge creation processes and resulting information outputs become blurred and complicated by information generated or mediated by automated systems, a need is emerging to expand concepts such as scholarship, research, and authority. Additionally, emerging technologies present complex ethical challenges for information use and creation which call for close examination through information literacy lenses.”
Librarians critically examine emerging technologies to learn how those technologies operate, including the decisions of the people making these products—from the top-down—and the human labor involved. Librarians study how everyday users search for information, the quality of that information, and how information ecosystems evolve (or devolve) in a community.
AI presents a powerful technological shift, and that should make all of us cautious. Unfortunately, some of those leading the development of this technology are selling it as the answer to a dark and dystopian vision of society. As librarians, we address this through the development of critical AI literacy frameworks.
AI is already embedded in so many aspects of our everyday lives, from education to healthcare. Librarians are not only teaching students how to use AI research tools like Consensus and Undermine: we are also teaching students how to critically evaluate the information these AI-mediated tools provide. We tell our students: “As scholars in your own right, we cannot tell you to use or not use AI [especially outside the classroom], but we want to ensure that if you do use it, you are in control of the machine and not the other way around.” (See also: AI, Integrity, and You: Navigating Ethics in College Research, a workshop we’re hosting on Nov. 18)
Teaching information literacy through the lens of AI is our form of resistance, advocating for and protecting critical thinking skills. We have always encouraged our students to poke at traditional modes of knowledge production: whether it was the gears of the scholarly publication machine or the foundations of what we consider “primary sources.” Always, this work requires being informed on a topic, doing the necessary research, utilizing the resources the library has to offer, and asking questions to subject experts, such as librarians and faculty.
The critical thinking skills that students develop by engaging with the library not only apply during their time in the classroom at LMU, but will be of vital use beyond the bluff as they engage with all forms of information in our world, AI-generated or otherwise.