Research Libraries Prepare for a World of AI-Influenced Research and Scholarship

Last Updated on May 23, 2024, 3:14 pm ET

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As organizations uniquely responsible for the past, the present, and the future of scholarship, research libraries have extensive experience with disruptive technology. Building on their rich history of embracing digital technologies, libraries are now leveraging the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, to innovate services, create educational opportunities, and evaluate the effects on their operations and collections. As a collective, our Association also has its eye on the horizon to ensure that our members, their constituent communities, and the research and learning ecosystem thrive through the disruption. That means recognizing the important balance between the democratizing, innovative opportunities of generative AI with potential threats to equitable access, intellectual freedom, and information integrity.

ARL’s historic strength is in advocacy for a balanced copyright regime, and through the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) the Association issued a set of principles for copyright and artificial intelligence in 2023. LCA submitted these principles through open consultations to the US Copyright Office and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Reflecting the position of libraries at the intersection of information user and information creator, the principles assert the crucial distinction between what a large language model ingests or is trained on and its output relative to copyrighted works. In other words, the innovation opportunities of generative AI require the protection of a robust fair use framework for training AI models, and existing copyright law can address AI-generated outputs that may infringe copyright through substantial similarity. ARL looks forward to engaging with the forthcoming US Copyright Office report on the impact of AI on copyright.

As a norm-setting organization of research library leaders, ARL also formulated a general set of guiding principles around generative AI. We hope the community will use the principles to influence policy and advocate for the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies, promote ethical and transparent practices, and build trust among stakeholders, within research libraries as well as across the research environment.

Finally, ARL and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) recently released a set of scenarios meant to plausibly anticipate the impact of machine learning and generative AI on the knowledge and research ecosystem in 2035. Scenario planning is not predictive, but is rather a tool to imagine a future—in this case with respect to AI—and to explore the range of uncertainty our sector will face as a result. At our recent Association Meeting in Boston, the ARL community engaged the AI scenarios, using them to prioritize opportunities.

Historically, investing in libraries has paid dividends for communities as they weather disruption of new technologies. ARL and its member libraries work with partners across the research and learning sector to preserve cultural heritage, and to support new modes of research and publishing, community efficacy, and student success. The Association welcomes collaboration in the advancement of its AI principles and the use of the scenario set. The scenarios can be used to derive insight and inform work to secure an information environment that advances the progress of knowledge.

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